Cures for Hunger (38 page)

Passing an Iroquois worker on a girder, he stepped on a bolt someone had left out and his ankle twisted. He liked the Iroquois men who were braver than his own and whom he copied when he hooked his heel on a beam and leaned down, his feet holding him in place as he set a rivet. The man grabbed his shirt and leaned back to counterbalance him. They hung in place. Then the Iroquois pulled them upright and let him go.

My father tried to calm himself, but his rage came on worse than before, the wildness, the desire to keep running the beams without boundaries, fearless, unencumbered.

“What's the point of this?” he asked Martin, a friend he'd made. The two would meet in a bar, drink, and discuss the future, but the conversation rarely got past work—jobs that were maybe a little better, but not so different—or the dowdy bar girls.

“It was . . . it was shit work,” he told me. “There had to be something better. I didn't know what. I couldn't imagine what another life might look like. I was just looking . . .”

On the skyscraper, at the end of each day, the bolder men ran to the corner and grabbed the flared edges and slid down story after story until their gloves were hot and their feet hit the ground. But that payday, as they ran to the corner laughing, my father just behind Martin, he saw his friend's pant leg catch on the end of a rivet.

Maybe it was the newness of friendship, the high, clean air, or simply the joy of being paid, of ending a long day, the sun flaring hard against the horizon, their nimble, overconfident running, and then his friend's silent, fragile, insignificant dive to stone.

The next morning, he hammered his sledge against a jammed beam. He'd begun to sweat. He struck three more times, then flattened his hand against the iron, reared, and drove the sledge down. The flesh of his pinky split like a bean pod, revealing white, knuckled bone. He cried out, the sledge flipping down through the steel ribs. He grabbed the girder and gasped. He felt as if he might weep, as if only now, with this pain, he could finally give voice to his hopelessness. He'd wanted the better compensation for a broken bone, but he couldn't bring himself to strike again.

For a few weeks, he rented a room on Montreal's Plateau and often sat on the fire escape teaching himself English from a book. He'd bought an eight-track and listened to rock 'n' roll. He went to a few boxing matches, frequented bars, and tried liquors whose labels were as foreign as the logos on the sides of trucks he'd watched pass as a kid. He held his bandaged finger before him like a symbol of nobility.

When he was almost out of money and nearly healed, he ran into Gaétan, a wolfish man from the high-rises who had a gift for making men laugh two hundred feet up while standing on a twelve-inch I beam. They talked about the poor pay and Martin's death. Then Gaétan admitted
he'd quit his job and said he was moving that afternoon. He asked if my father would help.

“You drive,” he said and directed him into an alley behind an apartment building and told him to wait. My father wondered how Gaétan could afford to live there or own such a nice car or why he'd insisted on putting the ragtop down, when clothes started falling from a balcony—silk dresses and pinstriped suits, a small wooden chest that bruised the upholstery, a jewelry box with a mirror that shattered. Rings tumbled along the floorboards.

When Gaétan swung down from the fire escape, my father was furious. But Gaétan was already in the car and said, “
Dépêches-toi!
”

My father hit the gas, and they raced off.

As he drove, Gaétan showed him a Judy Garland record. “C'est
du quoi ça!
”

My father didn't respond. When he reached the east end, he parked and got out and began walking, insulted to have been used like this. Gaétan called after him that if he wanted to make real money, he could ask for him in the bar.

My father left Montreal, afraid to be tied to the robbery. He took a job on a dam up north. He was there for several months. Sundays, he skipped Mass to go fishing, and just before sunset he sat on the scaffolding and smoked, staring off toward the West.

But within a month he had an accident. He'd been working at the top of the dam, pouring concrete into the wooden forms along its rim. He stood on the wood, guiding the sluice behind the truck. The sun was rising through mist and clouds, sometimes pale yellow or silver white, at times blinding. Bulldozers shifted mud and rock below the dam. He heard a cracking sound and grabbed the wood beneath his feet as the form he stood on broke free. The wall of the dam was rushing past, and he gripped the two-by-four frame that skidded like a sled along the concrete cliff, nails striking sparks.

He reached the shallow water below, crouched, his heart eerily calm, his mind empty, as if he'd been made to do this and nothing could be more natural. When the men along the rim saw that he was still on his feet, they began to cheer, and at first he couldn't understand why.

The next morning, he packed and took his final paycheck. At the post office, he divided his money and sent half to his family. He began hitchhiking west with what remained.

 

 

Travel was recent in my life, the thrill of setting out still familiar. There was the first breath taken as the journey began, the expansiveness in the lungs and heart. His words recalled this for me, the freedom of movement, the hunt for simple needs—food and places to rest—and above all the realization of how asleep we are, animals in our own cages, feeding ourselves indifferently. As we explore, meals and beds are not promised but won, coming into our lives with a power like revelation. He crossed the continent, amazed at the endless variety of earth and people. He saw the Native American man trapped on a rock in the river, and he understood that he wanted to live for himself and forget the dead.

He traveled aimlessly west and then, as his money ran out, back east. He arrived in Montreal penniless.

“Gaétan introduced me to the man who taught me safecracking. I was good at it. I liked the challenge. Safecracking's not for idiots. It takes concentration. It was like a game. I'd test myself. I knew I was good. But he didn't pay much. We'd steal a thousand, and he'd give me a hundred. I wanted to go out on my own. I told him I wasn't making much more than in the mines. He's the one who set me up.”

The night he broke into the sporting-goods store, he huddled in the doorway—wet streets, coronas beneath hooded lamps, no sound of footsteps. A long car with finned rear fenders passed, throwing up lines of spray. His hands were tight in his pockets, his chin to his collar, heart and mind still. He began to understand this strangeness in him, that he was at home only in uncertainty, in that place where possibility and danger extended about you like a naked plain.

Then he exhaled, the sound loud in the darkness, surprising him. He turned and slid a flat bar from inside his coat and jimmied the lock, cracking the casing. Inside, he waited until his eyes adjusted. He crept past racks of hockey sticks, shelves of ice skates and helmets, all colorless in the dark. At the back, his hands hunted over the panels of a door.
With a stab, he locked the bar and levered it. Slivers of wood crunched beneath his boots, screws trilling on the uneven floorboards.

In the next room, past the desk, he found the safe. As he knelt, the doorway flared. He rushed out. Blinded by the brightness, he slammed into a shelf. Balls fell and bounced across the floor. Each window was a brilliant grid, red and blue eddying behind the keen light.

He never described being arrested, only prison, the inmates no tougher than the men in his village, the constant tension, the almost-sexual sizing up as he passed cells and brushed shoulders. He hated the thin cots that smelled of sweat, the exposed toilet and the cracked sink stained from the drip of rusty water, the blood on its rim after that first fight, when he struck a man's head against it then let the weight of the slumping body pull the knotted hair from his fist. He hadn't foreseen that the inmates would explain his arrest, saying he'd been set up, patching theories as they pressed spoons into lukewarm potatoes.

“That was my school,” he told me.

Through talk and stories, the inmates taught him to pick any lock, to crack the hardest safes—they carried him beyond prison, to jewelry stores flush with daylight, to banks, and like a final secret, through steel-ribbed concrete vaults.

 

 

Behind his voice, there was the clear sound of pouring rain, its steady beating on his roof. Outside my window, in the moonlight, the first snow flurries lazed in the wind.

“Did you see your family again after that?” I asked.

“One more time,” he said. “One time after that. But I wasn't the same. I realized that I couldn't stay. Too much had changed.”

He was quiet a moment, his breathing barely audible against the rushing rain.

“I used to dream of going back rich. I realized how easy it would be. I learned everything in prison. I made a plan to go straight to the top. I would do the big job and take the money and go home. I never thought about what I'd do after that.”

“Why not?”

“I guess I knew I wouldn't go back. I knew I'd never be satisfied there.”

“Would you go back now?”

“No. Too long has passed.”

“What if we went back together?”

He hesitated. “That might be okay. The two of us. That could be all right.”

“Where do they live?” I asked, trying to sound patient, to mask the anger and resentment that came more and more frequently.

But he was silent. I wanted to insist, to tell him that it was my past, too, but I didn't. From the pause, the way he cleared his throat, I knew he would ask me to come back and work with him. He did so often. I would say no, so I didn't ask.

CURES FOR HUNGER

My father's birthday was the day before mine, and I decided to call after midnight so it would be both of our birthdays. He liked finding similarities in us and, during a previous conversation, had told me that every eleven years our ages were inverted: fifteen and fifty-one, twenty-six and sixty-two, thirty-seven and seventy-three. He also said he'd come across a book on astrology in a bookstore and read some—only out of curiosity, he added, as if to keep from sounding ridiculous. He'd noticed that we were Scorpios and tigers, and he wondered aloud if this meant anything, though he changed the subject before I could respond.

Leaves had fallen, winter had come early, the radio calling for a light snow. I pushed through the campus-center door and dialed from the pay phone, but he didn't answer.

What if he really was going to kill himself? Was college so important? The continent protected me from his life, though I hated myself for thinking this. Nothing but stories held us together, our conversations nearly devoid of the present.

“Sometimes I don't know what it was all for,” he told me one night. “I was trying to get away, but I never really knew what I wanted to get to. I was too busy just trying to get away.”

Other times he laughed, recalling his wildness. I sensed in his words the drive to do something dramatic and impossible for others—to take action and say, “This is mine. I did this.” The impulse seemed true to me, to leave a mark on the world before you could think about whether that mark was worth making. Even as I wrote, I was trying to figure out what I hoped to find, why I was composing this.

An hour later, I called again, wanting to fall into that momentary grace, our shared attraction to a life that denied nothing, that made holy the imperatives he could not begin to understand, so that I could do the same, write it with an equal fierceness.

I called over and over from the pay phone and gave up only after 3:00 a.m., when that brief, diminishing time, which I'd wanted to gift to him, had passed.

 

 

Two years in prison. He felt like a gambler who'd lost half the money in his pocket and was desperate to win back what he imagined was his. The lost years meant that his return home had to be dramatic. He couldn't go with nothing to show. He hadn't called them and didn't want to see them until he was rich. Only money could justify his absence.

Prison taught him the nature of the self, the way it can be shaped and hardened. He learned to like the adrenaline, to thrive on the thrill of a fight. He craved the world—all that he'd take for himself when he was free. Longing carved out an empty space within him. He felt gutted and learned to like this, too.

After prison, as he headed west and left Quebec behind, the plans he'd made began to come apart. Rage and a nameless desperation rushed him forward. Someone only had to bump into him in a bar and he'd fight. He pulled armed robberies, but the cash was never enough. With the intention of going straight, he took a few jobs, mining and construction, in the Yukon and Alaska, but they only confirmed his belief that without crime he'd never escape the life he'd been born into. It was his wildness that repeatedly put him back in jail, for fights or reckless driving.

After his release, he got a new social insurance card and a license with the name Gaston Tremblay, then crossed to Montana. He'd made friends in bars and prison, and they robbed a few banks. Drunk, they went into country tourist shops, guns ostentatiously tucked into their belts. They put on clothes and hats, filled their pockets with candy bars and beef jerky in front of the clerk, then walked out, waving good-bye. They ate dinners, then tore hair from their heads and threw it on the plates and said, “I'm not paying. There's hair in my food!” They once
fought an entire kitchen staff and finally ran out when the chef began swinging a cleaver at them.

Eventually they were arrested for robbery, and he did a year and a half in a prison where local teenagers took their mufflers off and drag raced outside the walls at night to wake the inmates. He'd lain in bed hating these kids, that they saw him as nothing more than a criminal who deserved punishment, that they didn't know what had brought him here, what he'd been running from. And yet he knew that in their place he'd have done the same and laughed over it. His stupidity and that of all people sickened him, and each morning he woke, waiting, impatient, a child again in his father's house, counting the months until his freedom.