Cures for Hunger (42 page)

“I wanted my own life,” he told me. “Too much had changed.”

But his words didn't ring true. That was the week before exams. I watched myself study. I was withdrawn. Daily, I walked the road to school and on occasion drove my uninsured SUV into town, usually after midnight, to the twenty-four-hour supermarket, the streets empty beneath cold Christmas skies, colored lights on a few leafless trees.

It was always late when we spoke, his voice loud while I kept mine hushed. He told me that life was a joke. He'd been raised without education and given direction by criminals.

“I robbed those banks in my early twenties,” he said. “I was a kid. A fucking kid. I'd do anything to start over. I wish I could've been you. You were always so full of hope.”

I'd heard enough about crime, but if I asked about his family, he'd just tell me that too much time had passed, that there was no point in going back.

“Still, I never lost heart,” he said. “I always had the nerve. I remember the last bank I tried to rob. I was with a guy who'd pulled a lot of jobs. I'd seen him rob other places. But we walked around the building, and he couldn't get his mask on. He kept saying, “Not yet.” After we passed the door the last time, he told me he couldn't do it. He was sweating and shaking. He didn't know what the point was anymore. He told me he just wanted his life to be simple. We were in the alley, and he asked to be let out. That's how it was. You could do it for years, and then the nerve just went out of you.”

I think of songs, of men in prison longing for motion, envious of the rumbling of trains, the inescapable sun above the road crew and the passing cars, the staring children or the naked shoulders of girls. The man couldn't bear the thought of damp nights in jail, the sun caged in windows. He said he wanted out because he had a baby coming, as did
my father, whom he'd turned to because he knew him to be reliable. They both had women waiting.

Now my father hesitated, as if he were searching for words.

“I let him off,” he said finally. “But I never lost it like that. I only stopped because you guys were born. I wanted a family and didn't want to go back to prison.”

Hearing him, I had the impression that he was bothered by his life since, that the one thing he'd wanted, a family, had failed him and he should have stayed in crime. But the truth was becoming clear to me. The banks and jewelry stores had been easier for him. He was still that boy afraid of wintering in the house, of being trapped in a normal life.

I wish I could hear him tell this again, not those easy crime stories in dim restaurants, the chairs upside down on the tables and the two of us the last in the place, but the way he tried to paint his power as he let his friend off. He spoke of a man so afraid, so uncertain of what the world had given him, that when he stopped and let the static hum along the phone line, I wasn't sure who he was describing.

 

 

The valley returns in simple impressions: patterns of light across the kitchen floor, the shadow of mountains outside, cool air through the door and our mother calling us to eat, the smell of dark bread and the hot elements in the open oven. Or the misted stillness, the sense of safety next to him as we crossed fields, the warped boards of the fence, its posts obscured by yellow grass.

The days I spent with him are among the clearest. I studied his face when he spoke—his dark, expressive eyes and large beard. His breath smelled of coffee. He was often lending small amounts of money, and once, standing outside his store as sunlight filtered past the three pines he'd planted there, I asked him why. He told me it was worth a little money to know if you could trust a person. I considered the wisdom in this and began lending nickels at school.

Those years, he built dog pens, put up fences, sold trees, and established stores. He hadn't been sure he'd enjoy this work, but the skills his father had taught him came back quickly—the fish on this coast not
so different, his hands moving the knife on their own, working him past the soft boundaries of memory. Often, it seemed he was challenging himself to do as much as he could, satisfied with the authenticity of the life he was building, affirming his strength, finding new ways to grow, to challenge himself.

One morning he came out of the house wearing a sports jacket, a briefcase in his hand. Our mother sat on the steps, watching us play. Wind rustled the leaves of the tree near the porch, casting a shadowed map of branches and sunlight across his face. He tugged at his sleeves, and she looked up. I watched, sitting on my bicycle, one foot on the ground, and she laughed. It was a laugh of pleasure and surprise, but he flushed and walked to the truck and got in. She'd longed for an existence in nature, but his desire had been to become the businessman in the stories he'd told his family, to transform himself one more time.

“Maybe I could have gone back,” he said, “if things had turned out differently with your mother. I could have shown them my family and business. They'd have understood that. But even then, it was complicated . . .”

“What was?” I asked, knowing now that nothing ever would have been good enough for him.

“I'd been gone a long time . . .” He hesitated, then spoke with an anger out of proportion to his words. “I remember when I went back, it was poor. I didn't want to be part of that world. And my brother, he was always getting in fights. He had a flat nose. I wanted to move on . . .”

 

 

After my mother left, he'd stayed in bed for weeks, hardly eating. He got up only to use the bathroom or drink water or continue the calls he made to her or her parents. In a drawer, he found the address of a psychic she'd seen, a woman who'd told her that Vancouver would be destroyed in an earthquake. He made an appointment, wanting his own prophecy. The woman said she couldn't talk about my mother, but told him that his middle child would be the first to return. It wouldn't be soon. That was all she could say.

When he finally drove downtown, his hands shook, nausea grabbing at his throat as he turned with the traffic. He sideswiped two parked
cars but didn't stop. His store was unlocked and abandoned. He'd eaten a carton of fries, but he threw them up when he opened the door to the melting ice and rotting fish, the bluebottle flies flecking the display windows. The power had been shut off, and a reddish, jellylike fluid seeped from beneath the door to the walk-in freezer. The rancid, humid air was overwhelming, and he stayed only long enough to see that no money was in the register. A wino's rusty shopping cart had been parked in the back room. Letters from creditors had piled on the floor. An eviction notice was posted on the door.

He sat in the minivan he'd bought a few months before, new on the market then—perfect for deliveries, he'd told everyone. His leather briefcase lay on the passenger seat and again he had a vision of filling it with fish. He'd take it to the bank and buy a safe-deposit box and put the fish inside. He realized that he'd spent years fighting banks or prisons, trying to get at something locked away or to keep from having himself locked up, in a prison or a house or a life that was too small.

Back home, as he lay in bed, the phone rang constantly. He had too many creditors and no money for taxes. The life he'd built was less substantial than he'd thought, and what he did next was more in keeping with his youth than those seven or eight years of relative success. After he stored a few of his possessions at a friend's house, he went home and got some gasoline, a rope, and a knife. He poured the gasoline on his head, made a small cut at his throat, and managed to tie himself up. Then he struggled free and called the police. When they got there, he told them that men had come to his house, bound his hands, put a knife to his throat, and dumped gasoline on him and threatened to set him on fire. He'd confessed to where he kept his stash of money, and they'd taken everything. The police filed the report of stolen earnings, which he sent in the next day with his tax papers.

Then he loaded a backpack with food, a can opener, and a bottle of whiskey. His creditors would be looking for him, and he knew that everything would be repossessed. He hitchhiked until he was dropped off at an entrance ramp of the TransCanada Highway. The moon was rising, and it was the hour when he'd normally return home to the comfort he'd struggled against. He wasn't far from a place he recalled, where the
wide median was heavily forested, and where, just beyond the nearest exit, there was a convenience store. He waited until no headlights were in sight, then crossed the pavement. The median was two hundred feet of forest. He pitched his tent in a deep, comfortable gully out of the wind. Even the sound of traffic seemed remote. He had a good sleeping bag. A little snow had fallen, preferable to the damp.

“No one expects you to disappear on the median of one of the world's longest highways,” he told me. “Your creditors will think you've changed provinces or gone across the border.”

He said that when he was in the city, every now and then he still ran across men who were amazed to see him. “We thought you were dead,” they'd say. “You just disappeared.”

And that night, unable to sleep, he did consider dying. He wished he could see his mother one last time and apologize for decades of absence and the grandchildren she didn't know existed. He asked himself what life he'd been made for, or if he was better off like this, here, alone. He lay with the bottle of whiskey as snow began to fall again, and his breath condensed into beads of moisture that speckled the canvas roof and froze.

But this wouldn't be an ending. He'd dreamed that a family and business would put his old life behind him, though my mother still tells me that he was never able to change in the one way that mattered—that she'd left him because what made him who he was couldn't change. It was too strong or too broken, strong in the way that injuries become strengths through endurance, that fractures mend hard within the bone.

As he lived on the median, the strength within him had to abandon a dream and find another shape, not quite new, but still testing and searching, incapable of not surviving. I imagine his tent pitched in the evergreens, in that wide descent of stony earth, an echoing culvert below. I've traveled enough to know the solitary emotions of highway nights, but I can't imagine that loneliness and rage. As he lay there, tremors passed through the earth, semis carrying raw tonnage from the interior along the highway that cut through the continent's vast wilderness, from Vancouver to Quebec, connecting the lives he'd abandoned.

“I was thinking about my mother,” he told me. “I loved her. I was her favorite, and I felt that I'd hurt her.”

“You could go back now,” I said, hesitant to interrupt his story, to challenge him or reveal that I was losing sympathy.

“No. It's been too long. I can't.”

“What was her name?” I asked.

But he was silent, and then he told me that it was late, and said good night.

 

 

The windshield wipers barely kept up with the rain as I pulled into the gas station and parked next to the phone booth. The forecaster was announcing an unusual storm: a cold, blustery precipitation that would turn into sleet and freezing rain after midnight. I'd be home soon. I had driven to the UMass library for research, and only the mountain road remained. Classes had let out for finals, and I hadn't talked to my father in a few days, but the night before, he'd left a message with my landlords:
your father called.

I ran through the rain to the phone booth and dialed collect, the connection bad. The operator's voice gave way to static marked by loud clicking. The line rang, and I waited for his accent, his quiet
h
's and heavy
r
's. When he answered, he sounded far away.

“Just a minute,” he said, and his end of the line went silent. Then he was back, his breath rasping. “I've changed my mind,” he told me straightaway. “I've decided I'm going to keep the store going. There's no point in giving up now.”

I took a deep breath, not sure that I believed him. “I'm glad to hear that.”

“This winter will be tough,” he said, “but I've gone through worse.”

“That's great. I was really worried about you. I was afraid I wouldn't hear any more of your stories.”

“You know,” he said, “when I was little—” His voice broke, whatever assurance he'd had instantly gone. “Things weren't good. I just want you to understand that.”

“What? Yes. I understand that.”

“I know I've made some mistakes, but I just want you to understand I've been angry for a long time. I keep thinking I'm not angry anymore, but then, you know, it doesn't take much. It doesn't take much, and I'm angry again. I was thinking about my uncle the other day. If I'd gone to live with him, I could have played hockey. I could have finished school. But my father needed me to work. And that was that. I was so angry. I remember, I saved every penny I had to buy a rusty pair of ice skates. But then I didn't have a hockey stick. It was stupid.”

He tried to laugh but broke into a dry cough.

“When I was a young man,” he said, “I thought if I'd been born English, everything would be all right. We had nothing but our family and the church. I didn't believe in the church, but I thought a family was the most important thing in life. I don't know why I hated one and not the other.” As he spoke, he paused to take long ragged breaths. “I should've hated both. I just used to think I'd have kids someday and everything would be different. But . . . but you're a lot like me. I think that's true, don't you?”

“In some ways, maybe.”

“I think in a lot of ways. You used to be pretty serious about crime.”