Cures for Hunger (35 page)

“But your health is okay.”

“Of course it's okay. My grandmother lived to a hundred. I'll probably live to a hundred, too.” He stared at me, his eyes suddenly clear and unguarded. “I never thought about that. Maybe you'll be too old to climb into those mountains to bury me. You'll be an old fart. Maybe I should die young. You can drive me into the mountains and bury me overlooking the ocean. I'd like that, but you'd have to be young and strong. I wouldn't be able to wait until I'm a hundred.”

“It's probably illegal,” I said.

He shrugged. “Yeah. A lot of things are illegal if you get caught. You figure it out. If you can't get my body, just use the ashes. I won't be angry at you.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I don't like this
okay
bullshit.” He asked me to promise one more time, and I did.

He drank another beer as we finished the meal in silence. I felt that I'd never seen things so clearly, the strangeness of my family, how hard it was to make sense of him. He'd been the person I'd stood against, measured myself against, declared my freedom from. I didn't know how to see him weak.

He noticed me watching and narrowed his eyes, glaring, letting me know he was still awake, that I'd better not count him out too soon.

Getting up, he swore and grabbed at the table.

“I'm too drunk to walk,” he told me with a smirk and drove his elbow hard into my ribs. “Yep, I'm too drunk to walk. Looks like I'll have to drive.”

 

 

We met a few more times before I left. He told stories after late dinners. Snow flurried across the parking lot, and his eyes almost closed as he gazed through the window. He described the boredom of work camps, a day when polar bears maundered through a mining town, a night so cold his axles froze, though he'd left the engine running as he slept.

“Crime,” he said, “was better than anything I'd known. If you saw where I came from, you'd understand. It felt like the only way out.”

I dropped him off one evening when his truck was in the garage. He went through the metal gate, and five large shepherds ran across the yard and gathered about him anxiously, lifting their heads as he moved his hands, touching each of them on the nose until they calmed. He stood still, gazing on them as they sat or stretched out at his feet.

Though I'd soon be free, I no longer felt the need to run. I simply craved the highway, its lightness and sense of loss, as if the divine could be found only by leaving, by losing myself in the country. Yet even as I thought this, I couldn't imagine my father's future. I refused to let myself feel anything, afraid I might stay, so I just watched, seeing, studying as if for later, as if I knew that he'd soon be gone and only these memories would help me understand. In the big dogs' wordless allegiance, in the way his presence calmed them, I sensed his need for one thing that would never leave or betray him.

My mother's talk of destiny came back to me, the hope and necessary destruction I'd found in her words. But nothing in our futures seemed as perfect as our lives in the valley. I stood at the window as dogs loped across the fields, followed by a man. They raced away from him, toward an invisible point, leaping and falling over each other, then rushed back as he continued through the rows of trees with the same steady pace.

Once, he'd taken me to sloping mountaintop pastures. He wore his rain jacket and sou'wester and walked the rows, pruning trees. I huddled
in the green pickup as fog blew past, silhouetting him and masking all but the snap of the machete. When he came back, his clothes were soaked. I asked why, and he tousled my hair and said it was the clouds. “What clouds?” I asked. He said that what was all around us wasn't fog. Later the clouds broke and sunlight raced over the damp trees and grass. Beneath us the valley opened, a swath of green marked with specks of color, the road and streams intertwined like sleeping snakes.

 

 

The day I left for California turned out bright, sun flashing on snowmelt.

We met where I was having my SUV serviced for the trip, and he drove me to get lunch.

“It's good that you're going to travel and go to college,” he said, squinting in the light through the plateglass windows. “I'd have done the same thing if I could.”

“I can come back and visit,” I said.

He smiled and looked down. “Who knows? Who knows with this fucking life?”

“No, seriously, I'll come back.”

“You don't know that.” He sat with his shoulders curved forward, appearing fragile.

As he drove me back to the garage, we followed a red convertible in the traffic.

“Look at that guy,” he said. “It's not that warm.”

The blond driver was bundled in a jacket, and his alert posture made him appear nervous. The four-lane road had a broad median, and he pulled into the left-hand turn lane in front of us. The oncoming traffic passed in packs, and there were several openings that he didn't take. With each gap, he lifted his head and inched forward. The car looked almost new, its red paint brilliant and its tires a solid black.

“Goddamn it,” my father said, “doesn't he see he's had plenty of chances to turn?”

Traffic surged past again, and two more openings came and went. My father lowered his window and leaned out.

“Turn!” he roared, the tendons in his throat standing out. “Turn, you son of a bitch!”

The driver hit his accelerator, and an oncoming sedan braked and rammed his fender, crumpling the hood and scattering shards of plastic and glass over the road.

“Jesus Christ!” my father said. He swerved back into traffic and sped away. He glanced at me. “I didn't mean for him to turn
right then.
”

My heart hammered as I looked back at the crushed, diminishing cars, wondering if anyone had been hurt. They vanished from sight and we stared forward, neither of us speaking. Then we glanced at each other and began to laugh.

We were still chuckling and swearing under our breath when he dropped me off. We shook hands, and I told him I'd call, and he said I could always come back if I wanted.

I just nodded, and he started his engine and pulled his truck next to me.

“Hey,” he said. “Do you know I'm the number one driver in Vancouver?”

“What?”

“That's what everyone tells me. Whenever I drive by, they say, ‘Hey, you're number one,' and they do this.” He showed me his hand and lifted his middle finger.

He laughed and jammed his accelerator, spraying slush and oily grit from the asphalt. I covered my face as he scorched a half circle. Then, as if to say that he was the one leaving, he raced into traffic, cars braking and swerving, and soon his truck was gone from sight.

IMAGINARY FAMILIES

My father and I spoke little over the next year. I traveled to California and stayed with a friend and four other young men in a two-bedroom apartment, writing when I could and working for a temp agency renovating a Sears. We slept on couches around the TV and climbed chain-link fences at night to swim in pools. But the friend started a fight over a girl and I left, though I would have regardless because the next day we were evicted.

When I told my father on the phone, he asked me to come back and help at his store. Instead, I headed east, looking for jobs in Utah and Colorado. I wended my way across the continent, and by April ended up in Virginia, where I worked construction until the first semester of college began.

By then I was grateful for it, having struggled to write another novel and realizing how little I knew, how much I wanted the time to study. I loved the readings and discussions. With each novel, I felt myself filled with language, erasing the old patterns words could take, creating possibility. I reread
Absalom, Absalom!,
searching through threads of identity, the ambition that grew into a man, hiding the initial wounded impulse of a boy.

When I thought about what I might write, I envisioned a great novel just as my father might have imagined the big job. The novels I loved most grew from awareness of family: talk between generations, the shared, conflicting wisdom, parents and grandparents rooting forward-gazing children. Novels seemed the product of that tension, between parents and children, between those they loved and struggled against.
As I embraced these novels, it occurred to me increasingly that I knew next to nothing about my father's past. That absence, the dim history that had shaped him, refused to let him become whole.

During our rare phone conversations, I asked again about his family and why he'd lost contact with them. As usual, he evaded the questions, saying that too long had passed, that he had nothing in common with them anymore. When I asked about Quebec, he told me how backward it was, how poor they were. And then he changed the subject to his business. It was struggling, and he asked if I'd come back and help. But I was happy, and the desperation in his voice made me wary.

Talking to him, I was unsure of what to feel, as if he were a stranger. My life and ambitions were now so different that I no longer knew where he fit. Only when I wrote did emotions surface, did I feel his absence and worry about him.

The summer after my freshman year, I again worked construction in Virginia. He and I spoke, and he asked if I wanted to visit him, but I said it was too far. I feared I wouldn't make it back to college. My life had an equilibrium, a shape, at last, and I was afraid to disturb it.

 

 

Silence settled in the rooms. Through the window, autumn air seemed vaguely sweet, flavored with the decay of leaves. The only sound was the dull tap of the few remaining moths against the screens.

A week earlier, I'd moved into an attic apartment on the mountain road leading to school. Two professors rented it to me, and since the house phone didn't reach my door, I waited for them to leave so I could call my father. I watched their car's taillights disappear down the curve of the driveway. It was strange to think that at fourteen I'd broken into a house, but now I was so desperate for this life that I was cautious in every way. I didn't want the professors to overhear my conversations, the casual talk around crime.

I called collect. I'd tried twice that week, but the line had been busy. Now it rang repeatedly. I was about to hang up when he answered, his voice so hoarse I hardly understood it.

The operator gave my name, and he accepted, then asked, “Who's this?”

I repeated it loudly.

“Hey, Deni. Is that you?” He coughed and cleared his throat.

“Are you sick?”

“A little.”

“It's nothing serious?”

He coughed again. “Just a minute. I need to clear my throat.”

The phone clunked down. From a distance, there was the reedy sound of a faucet, and then his cough, thick and wet.
Sick
was a word my father never said. Once, when I was four or five, my mother had told me to leave him alone because he was sick. He'd been sitting in his chair, looking focused and furious, as if refusing this weakness.

“Are you okay?” I asked when he picked up the receiver again.

“Yeah . . . I'm fine. I was expecting you to call.”

“I've tried, but your line was busy.”

“I've been taking it off the hook.”

“What kind of cold do you have?”

He fumbled with the receiver and said only, “I've been a little sick lately.”

“Should I let you go?”

“I just woke up. It takes a minute to get going.”

He coughed a few times, then breathed loudly, saying nothing as I talked randomly about the classes I'd enrolled in.

“Do you think you'd want to come back,” he interrupted, “just this once? You could take a few months off.”

“I can't. I'm already enrolled.”

Absentmindedly, I turned the lamp off, the house dark but for the porch light, the furniture faintly silhouetted.

“How's the market doing?” I asked.

“Not good. There's new management running the building.”

“Shouldn't that help?”

“No, the manager's a fucker. He raised the rent.” He drew a slow breath, then went on in a faint voice, describing store owners leaving,
just walking away, and how the manager used to work for “that dictator in the Philippines.” “Marcos,” he added uncertainly.

He paused and swallowed a few times, sounding a bit like a person rearranging dentures. “I'm not intimidated. They're overcharging and bullying people, but I can handle it.”

“You can keep the store going?”

He started to cough again. His receiver rasped against his shirt.

“Sorry about that,” he said. He sounded drunk, slurring his words.

“You were telling me about the new manager.”

“Yeah. He's a big guy and people are afraid of him, but that doesn't work with me. He tries to play games, and I put him in his place.” He hesitated, panting softly into the receiver. “I'm getting fed up with that damned store. I guess I've been thinking a lot about success.”

“Success?” I made a noise in my throat to let him know I was listening.

“I've been thinking,” he said—“I've been thinking I haven't accomplished much. I don't like failure.” He suppressed a cough, then talked about not being able to cross the border to do business, and how that affected him. “But it's good to see you going in the right direction. I know you'll get somewhere. We both like to accomplish things.”

His breath remained short and labored. Abruptly, he said, “I guess I'm thinking of letting the store go. I might have to declare bankruptcy again. I'm thinking of doing something else.”