Cures for Hunger (26 page)

On my first day in class, when another student said, “What's up with the jacket?” I explained that I wore leather because it was hard to stab someone through it.

“I just want to play it safe,” I said gruffly. “You never know. It's happened before.”

My stories soon established me as the school's best fighter, its most unpredictable and volatile student. The one time I was confronted—three lanky bullies appearing from the hallway crowd, peach fuzz on their chins, oversize Raiders jackets slung back on their shoulders—I puffed my chest, bugged my eyes, and conjured the scariest face I knew—my father's, though I had no idea exactly when I'd seen him this way.

“You fuck with me,” I hissed, “I'm going to kill you—all of you.” Spit
flecked my lips, and the boys edged back as I showed them all the white my eyes could muster.

“Yeah, you just be careful,” the one in the middle said and glanced from side to side at his cohorts. They turned and strutted awkwardly until they reached the end of the hall and pushed out the double doors into the pale sunlight.

By lunch, I was back at the corner table, writing a poem about the highway at night, the chug of diesel engines and big trucks downshifting to low gears. The cold slip of air behind each passing car evoked everything I could ever want to tell another person.

 

 

Teachers saw that I liked to write and encouraged me, but I knew—lying in the dark bedroom as my poetic semis blundered past, winter air seeping through the cardboard—that in my old dream of levitation the monk who rises must first make peace with solitude.

Unable to sleep, I got up and wrote. I attempted novels about futuristic societies verging on collapse, or stories about wanderers, a boy who meets a girl on a roadside and can briefly reveal his tenderness before moving on with the hard-set face of the man he has yet to become. It seemed as if only when I was finding the words, writing them, could I understand what I really felt.

“You know,” my father said over dinner, in what was to become our weekly routine. He intoned the two words in the voice he used when about to introduce an idea I might not like. “You know, I was thinking. There are these two men I buy from. They're crab fishermen, a father and son. They work together. They drink together. They're a real team. You used to love working with fish when you were a kid.”

I kept my eyes half-lidded. I shrugged and forked ravioli into my mouth, drank some beer, chewed and swallowed.

“Yeah, well,” I said out of the side of my mouth, “I'm not a kid anymore.”

“What do you want to do? Just go to school?”

“What's wrong with that? I'm fifteen.”

“And then what?”

“I want to be a writer.”

“Why? What do you have to write? You're just a kid.”

“No I'm not.”

I hunched, affecting the glowering brow of the burly redheaded man in the convenience store. I shoveled some more ravioli into my mouth, drank and swallowed.

“I need rent money,” I told him.

“Don't you have it? You said you're working.”

He forced an incredulous smile, as if I had to be kidding after my show of certainty.

“Almost.”

“How much do you need?”

“A hundred and fifty more.”

“How about this? I give you the money, and you work it off for me this summer.”

I sighed, squinting like the Italian tough waiting in the sports car, but this was exactly what I'd expected. I knew that he thought I couldn't survive on my own, that I'd come back to him and give up on school, but I wouldn't.

“Fine,” I said.

He took a wad of cash from his pocket and peeled off three fifties and tossed them before me, his eyes attempting compassion.

 

 

That I'd work for him in June created constant apprehension, distracting me at school and keeping me up at night. He mentioned the job frequently over the next months, but I just nodded and refused to say anything on the subject.

The face that worked best against him, I had learned, was impassive: the outside the opposite of the inside, offering nothing. I studied it in teachers when students complained, in the principal when he dealt with misbehavior, in the bus drivers who refused those who couldn't pay the fare, in the police who directed traffic outside my school. This was how men dealt with the world. My father told stories, maybe to impress
me or just to fill the silence, and though I enjoyed them, I did little more than nod. If I needed his money, I took it as if it meant nothing.

One night, entering a restaurant, we passed a man who was trying to ask for directions at the register, his English heavily accented. My father stopped abruptly and spoke in French, offering to help. The man, portly, with a ruff of gray hair, smiled and told him where he needed to go. As my father explained, his words seemed to come in spurts. He'd hesitate, then point outside, in the direction of the highway, and his mouth would hang open, and suddenly he'd give a list of instructions in a rush. Then he'd pause again, searching for words.

The man's eyes narrowed. “
Ça fait longtemps que t'es parti?
”

My father flushed and looked off.

“
Plusieurs années,
” he said, then asked, “
Tu viens d'où?
”

“
Chicoutimi,
” the man told him, but the friendliness had faded slightly from his expression. He thanked my father for the directions and hurried out.

My father pulled at his jacket as if it hadn't been sitting right on his shoulders. He sighed and glanced around the restaurant, blinking. Even after we were seated, he seemed uncomfortable and kept exhaling loudly, sounding annoyed. I wanted to ask him when he'd last spoken French, or any of the questions that came to mind when I thought about his past—who his parents were, where he'd grown up—but I didn't want to upset him further.

“I was seeing this girl,” he finally told me, looking about as if unsure of what to say, and he rummaged in his jacket's inside pocket and took out a Polaroid. A young woman sat on his couch. She had short, spruced-up dark hair and looked a little older than Jasmine.

“She's pretty, huh?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “Yeah, she is. Are you still dating her?”

He shrugged and put the photo away. “Not really.”

“What happened?”

“It just wasn't working.”

“And what about Sara?”

He scrunched up his cheeks as if with confusion, then went on to confess that he'd asked her to move in with him and start a family, but
that she'd run away with the car he was lending her. Eventually the police brought it back, though he didn't press charges.

“It's strange,” he said, “how people can disappear in the same town.”

The thought occurred to me that for a criminal he relied on the police a little too much.

When I asked about Jasmine, he said only that she hadn't wanted to do her job. He'd driven her to the countryside where her mother lived and dropped her off. Telling me this, he appeared distracted, his expression haggard. His life seemed empty, and in that emptiness I saw a threat. I didn't want to be the person to fill it.

But complete freedom, I knew, would come only when I had wheels of my own. This seemed a biological truth: without a license and a car, nothing was possible.

After we'd finished eating, when one waitress was vacuuming and the other putting chairs upside down on tables, he looked around as if to leave, then hesitated and took the toothpick from his mouth.

“You know, I get it,” he said. “I remember when I didn't want to listen to anyone. But I was a good kid. I logged or worked in mines, and I sent money to my family. Then, when I was eighteen, I guess, I realized what bullshit it was. I decided I'd had enough, and I left and hitchhiked across Canada, all the way to Vancouver. You wouldn't really understand, but the world was changing back then. When I was a kid, I didn't have many opportunities. Then I was a young man, and everything seemed possible. The music was different. People were dressing different. Quebec was changing, but I didn't have an education or any skills other than manual labor. I was angry at my family. I'd given them everything, and my younger brothers and sisters had gone to school, but my parents had done nothing for me.

“Anyway, I started hitchhiking. This was before crime. I just wanted to get away from everyone. I was in Ontario, and I'd been dropped off and was walking, looking for my next ride. There was a river next to the road, and I saw a man on a boulder right in the middle of the rapids. It must have been springtime because the water was high. My English wasn't very good back then, but I waved down a truck and stayed until some men with ropes and life vests got there.”

He paused. He'd been holding the toothpick in his fingers, rolling it back and forth, and now he put it down and stared off.

“When we finally pulled the guy out, we saw that he was from the reservation. He had a long black braid, and he didn't say anything. We took him to a diner and gave him some dry clothes and a cup of coffee. That's when he told us his friend had been taken by the river. That's how he said it. ‘The river took my friend.' The men who rescued him were pretty angry he'd waited so long to tell them. A police officer kept saying, ‘It's just like one of them.'

“I joined the search party, and we spent all day walking the river, looking for the missing friend. I was just trying to be helpful, but I understood the Indian. When you know someone's dead, what's the point? I just cared about myself, about what I was going to do with my life, and I didn't want to waste my time on a dead guy. But I helped even if it was pointless, because that's what you're supposed to do. When we got back to the diner, the Indian was gone. He didn't even help us look. I thought a lot about that, and it made sense to me. I'd been worrying about making money for my family when I had nothing for myself. I was living just to work shit jobs. It really got me thinking about what I wanted. We're not alive for that long, and you might as well go for it and make yourself happy.”

We were the only diners left, sitting in a forest of upturned chair legs, and I wasn't sure why he'd told the story, what had caused him to remember or try to make peace. But I was in total agreement. I didn't have sympathy for anyone. The only person who mattered was me, and I would do whatever was necessary to make my life the way I wanted it.

 

 

The rain and sleet that dogged the winter, the cold that froze the puddles left by the Northwest's constant drizzle, gave way to sunny, mild days. But while other students relished the sunlight and wore T-shirts and shorts, I brooded, thinking of how I could avoid working for my father. For three months, he'd helped pay the rent. At school, I'd done everything I could to be a good student. I wrote for the yearbook, the
school newspaper, ran cross-country, and worked out every day afterward in hopes of returning home as late as possible. I refused drugs with a conviction that startled me, and I didn't drink but for the occasional beer with my father. Instead, I wrote, feeling as if I stood on the edge of a cliff—as if, were I to look away from the page, vertigo would overcome me.

Students were crowding into the cafeteria, laughing, and pushing into line. I stopped at the bulletin board. I knew every post for contests and clubs, but there was a new one, a green photocopy: a Mandarin summer camp on Vancouver Island had fifteen places for BC students. I pulled the sheet down and hurried to my English classroom, but it was empty. My history teacher, a lean Trinidadian man, sat at his desk next door, eating rice from Tupperware. I asked if we could talk. He had me pull up a chair, and ate as I explained. His eyes bugged out when I described my father's crimes. I knew I wasn't being fair, but I was desperate.

By that afternoon, my teachers had met with the principal, who then called me into his office. They had agreed to write recommendations, and though the program didn't offer scholarships, the principal had called its director and explained my situation. He'd proposed using school funds to pay for me.

When the time came to tell my father, I prepared my face.

“Mandarin—what do you mean?” he asked over dinner. “Like the oranges?”

“No. Chinese. I'm going to learn beginner's Chinese.”

“Chinese!” he shouted and stood from his chair. Other diners turned.

“Fucking Chinese! You're fucking going to learn Chinese!”

“It's useful, you know,” I told him—that and some stuff I'd heard at school about how the Chinese might dominate the world. I remained seated, managing to stay impassive.

“But you're supposed to work for me,” he said, showing his palms and then extending them slowly, as if offering a sword. The gesture was so full of frustration and confusion and supplication that I actually felt bad for him.

“I want to study Chinese,” I insisted, my expression empty, offering
nothing he could fight. “It's a big scholarship. Not everyone gets it. It was made especially for me. I can't turn it down.”

He sat in his chair as if shot, staring, mouth open, eyebrows lifted.

“They made it just for you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm a good student.”

He nodded once, then picked up his fork and stared down at the heap of twisted spaghetti, shaking his head as if his job were to untangle it.

 

 

A strip of yellow light gleamed beneath the drawn blinds. Across the small dorm room, my fat Taiwanese roommate snored. I inhaled the ethereal reek of his father's cologne, with which he doused himself in hopes, I assumed, of easing homesickness.