Cures for Hunger (32 page)

 

 

“Deni,” my father said when I finally dialed his number collect.

How many times could I do this—keep running somewhere else?

“How are you?” he asked, trying to sound jaunty. “I heard about college.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, so when would it start?”

“In two months. In September.”

He was briefly silent. “Two months. You should come and visit me first. You're going to be busy once you start, right?”

“Yeah. I don't know. I'll probably be busy.”

We were going through the motions. I'd accept whatever he offered. I couldn't see how I could get to college from where I was, with two changes of clothes and less than fifty bucks. My mother had little for herself and couldn't help me. I'd been pushing to be unattached, as far on the edge of life as possible, and here I was.

A day later, crossing the country once again felt like a solution. As I drifted west, the plains opened before me in a green unfurling of sunlight, until the jagged skyward saw of the Continental Divide warned me of change.

THE FLOOD

The lines on either side of his mouth had deepened, crow's feet at the corners of his eyes, though his dark hair didn't have a hint of gray. We were eating dinner together but hadn't yet talked about why I ran away.

“I remember one time I'd just robbed a bank,” he said. “I bought a new Thunderbird with the cash and decided to drive cross-country, but I picked up this kid hitchhiking. He probably wasn't even eighteen. We were in Nevada, and I asked him, ‘How long do you think it will take for the engine to blow if I drive this car as fast as it can go?' He laughed and dared me. That's back when I was still pretty crazy. A dare was all it took. So I buried the needle and just kept going. We were in the desert, and it was hot. After about an hour, the hood shot up. It sounded like I'd crashed into another car, but it was just the engine blowing. Steam and smoke sprayed everywhere. We were on the side of the road like that when a cop showed up.”

My father was smiling, and I tried to figure out what had made him think of the story.

“This cop,” he told me, “he was a real hard ass. You could tell he didn't believe that the engine of a brand-new Thunderbird just blew. So he said to us, ‘Have either of you ever been in trouble with the law?' And this eighteen-year-old kid says, ‘Yeah.' He's playing it tough and giving the cop a hard time, but I had a suitcase of cash in the trunk. I wanted to kill that kid. The cop finally took him in to check his record and dropped me off at a towing company. I realized then that I wasn't as crazy as before. I'd been just like that kid, but I wasn't anymore.”

He hesitated. “That's part of being young. You have to take risks and piss people off.”

I finally got it. This was his way of saying he knew why I'd left. We would never discuss it directly. But though I didn't relate to the boy and was cautious around police, I understood the wild pleasure of driving a car just to see it blow.

“Anyway, I was thinking,” he went on, “before you leave, we should go fishing.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

He dropped his gaze and nodded to himself, knowing better than to remind me of the boy I used to be, or the things I'd once loved.

 

 

Encouraged by him, I began kickboxing again. The trainer, a bowlegged Irish Newfoundlander with webs of broken veins on his cheeks, encouraged his fighters, often illustrating endurance with stories of fishermen adrift in fog or miners trapped underground who resorted to drinking their own piss. In his hip pouch, he carried a bottle of painkillers.

“Hey, do I sign you up for the tournament?” he asked, though I'd been back only one month.

“Sure. I mean, you think I'm ready?” I was pleased by his enthusiasm, but he shrugged and said, “Why not?” then wrote down my name.

The summer was passing too quickly, days sunlit and cool. By mid-August, I still hadn't made up my mind. I was supposed to be in Vermont soon. My father and I hadn't mentioned college since I'd arrived. He'd given me back the SUV and paid me too well, tossing me wads of cash as if it meant nothing. Three or four times a week, we had dinner.

“A tournament!” he said, leaning forward. “When is it?”

“In a couple weeks, I guess.” I didn't want him there. Though I liked that he believed in me, I knew the truth. I got no thrill from battering others, and the best fighters in our gym lusted to hammer on anything. Besides, I'd been working on a dystopian novel, an epic of social breakdown, and often, after writing all night, I could barely train.

“I'm considering deferring,” I told him to change the subject.

“What's that?”

“It means I'd put it off for a year.”

“Put what off?”

“College.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “You can do that?”

“Yeah. Besides, I never planned on going. I can write without it.”

He nodded, his expression neutral, as if this were a conversation of no great importance.

“You know,” he said, “I read in the paper one time about a really popular writer who didn't go to school. Besides, you should be a fighter, and there's this tournament.”

“I might not even be ready,” I told him. “It's not a big deal—just practice.”

He studied me, then looked off. He got the point and wasn't going to push, probably satisfied for now that I'd dropped my plans. But I hadn't done this for boxing, and telling him, I'd felt cold, involuntarily, as if I couldn't risk sharing even my uncertainty for fear that he'd impose his own vision on me.

“If you're planning to stay a while,” he said, thinking hard, eyes focused on the floor, “you'll probably want your own place and a job that pays more.”

“I guess,” I replied, mostly just to prompt him to keep talking.

“I know a guy with an apartment for rent, and there's a job I could get you. It'd probably be good for you to do things on your own. You want your freedom, right?”

Over the past month he'd mentioned that his stores weren't doing well. Did he think we'd be better off if I didn't work for him, or was he struggling? I tried to see how he'd benefit from what he proposed, but I couldn't. Regardless, I liked the idea of my own place, of having distance from him, writing and reading where no one could bother me. So a week later, I moved into the apartment and started the job he'd lined up at a seafood processing and packing plant, a huge rectangle on the edge of a canal just outside Vancouver.

My days started at five in the morning. Boats lagged, unloading crates of codfish under clouds of wheeling seagulls. The sun rose beyond the cargo doors as forklifts crossed the processing rooms, propane fumes stinking up the salty air.

Though I planned to put away money for travel, I immediately realized my mistake. Rent and a vehicle ate up a lot, and my job and training
left me exhausted. The date for college passed, the weather cooling, rain replacing sunshine, and to prove I'd made the right decision, I bought a secondhand computer and wrote every night. The more I did, the more my emotions overwhelmed me, and the hungrier I got. Insignificant scenes, a young man leaving a new friend, were charged with grief, as if I were saying good-bye to everyone I'd abandoned. My stomach rumbled, and I emptied the fridge, making 3:00 a.m. supermarket runs: orange and apple juice, blocks of cheddar, quarts of strawberry yogurt, instant mashed potato mix, value packs of sirloins.

“What happened?” my trainer blurted after weighing me in at the tournament. I was one pound over the limit for my class. Seeing my name in the heavyweight column, he took the pill bottle from his hip pouch, popped the lid, and swallowed one.

I'd read most of the night, and now sat against the cinder-block wall to finish
Brave New World.
Fighters from my club glanced over and shook their heads.

When it was my turn for the ring, a redheaded teenager standing next to me said, “Aw, man, you got the half-breed. Be careful.”

I hadn't given much thought to the fight. As soon as I put down the book, I felt disoriented, then indifferent, as if none of this mattered and I was just biding my time. A twinge of concern made it through only when I went into the ring. Nearly a foot taller, my opponent faced off, half-Chinese and half-Irish judging from his last name. Almost instantly, he was midair, spinning, driving his heel at my gut. He kicked repeatedly as I tried to circle in. I timed his landing and struck at his ribs, driving him back, but one of my kicks hit wrong, the side of my foot catching his hip bone, the pain sudden and intense. Backing away, I limped, shocked to find myself here. The pain felt like the truth—that I should be elsewhere, that I didn't care about this—as if it were true that only by disaster, or something resembling it, could I learn what was real.

 

 

“You lost,” my father said without inflection, sitting at the table, his arms crossed. When I'd called to tell him about my foot, so swollen it barely fit inside my shoe, he'd insisted that I meet him right away.

“I don't know what to do about work,” I said, limping to the chair.

His eyes focused in, seeing the concern on my face, and for the first time since I'd returned, he leveled his look of disdain.

“Fake hurting yourself.” He spat the words. “That's why I told you to come here and not go to the doctor.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to get my face back under control, embarrassed to have him see me like this.

“Isn't it obvious? You go to work on Monday and pretend to hurt yourself. Then you collect workers' compensation.”

I was taking slow, deep breaths, willing my expression to indifference, telling myself that none of this mattered, that I could deal with it. But when I spoke, the emotion was there again.

“I'll have to spend the weekend like this,” I said.

“What's the big deal? All you do is write. You don't need to walk.” He waved his hand as if dismissing me, then explained how to defraud workers' compensation. “Everyone does it,” he added as if offering me a joint. “I did it once when I wasn't much older than you. I was on a construction site, and I smashed my pinkie with a sledgehammer.”

“Did it hurt?” I asked, wanting to take the attention off myself.

“Of course it hurt. I was trying to break the bone. You always got a longer leave for a broken bone, but my finger didn't even break. The skin just opened right up. I could see the entire bone. It hurt so goddamn bad I couldn't bring myself to hit it again.”

I nodded, considering what he was proposing, that it was probably easy, though I didn't want to do it. It didn't seem necessary.

“But what if I get caught? Can't doctors tell how old a bruise is?”

“What the fuck?” He leaned close, looking hard at my face, the edge of his lip lifting. “This is nothing. You used to talk about robbing banks. Get over it.”

The waitress came, and he sat back and smiled and ordered pasta with chicken. She strutted off, the menus in one hand, and again, he hunched over the table.

“Just so you know,” he told me with an anger that conveyed his full disappointment, “I'm not supporting you. You want to write all day, then you figure this one out.”

I shrugged. “I have enough money left over to get by for a while.”

“Aw, fucking come on.” He gripped the table as if he were going to flip it. “You're a minor. If you get caught, your record will be erased when you turn eighteen. Have some balls.”

I nodded and rubbed my cheek. He hated that I'd lost, that I was weak and showing it, that I couldn't keep it in. And I hated it, too.

“How do I do it?” I asked, speaking softly.

He shook his head. “You want to write novels and you can't even figure out how to fool a bunch of idiots.
This
should be easy.”

 

 

At the horizon, a gray line corrugated by low, uneven clouds announced the dawn.

My foot throbbed with each step, a dull prodding sensation like a blunt nail against the bone. All weekend, I'd written as the red and black bruise spread, and now, gritting my teeth, I made my way across the parking lot and tried not to think about the breaking of a law put in place for a good reason. In my novel, the dystopian society was the result of greed and war, and my actions seemed no better. But if I didn't do this now, I would look like I'd always been full of shit.

I shut out my thoughts and decided. I crossed the warehouse, empty, existing only through my senses: a gust of wet air, the hiss of water hoses and the banging of metal carts over floor drains, the weight of my rubber boots.

And then, briefly, I was alone in the gymnasium-size freezer, beneath the high metal shelves. Bing, a wiry Chinese man with liver-spotted cheeks and orange teeth, had gone to get the forklift, and I was supposed to load boxes on a pallet. I glanced around, then reached up, pulled three boxes from the shelf, and let myself fall with them. They cracked against the concrete, jostling blocks of frozen shrimp inside. I jammed my foot into the pallet's slats, then lay, looking at the distant ceiling and trying to grimace, though I just felt resigned, carrying out this task with the same indifference I'd shown the rest of my work.

“What wrong?” Bing asked as soon as he got down from the forklift.

“I twisted my foot,” I told him, clutching my ankle.

He laughed. “Get up!” When I didn't, he furrowed his brow and repeated, “Get up!”

“I can't!” I said, feigning concern.