Cures for Hunger

by Deni Béchard

  “Did you like school?” I asked him.

  “I didn’t go for very long,” he said, eyes on the TV. “I had to work, but my brother and me, we’d walk my sisters to school and beat up kids who bothered them on the road.”

  “Where are your sisters now?”

  He looked at me, then stared off and sighed. He seemed uncomfortable, the way I did when my mother made me put on too many winter clothes, but he had only his underwear on. He sat tensely, as if he might jump out of his chair and run forever.

  “Can I stop going to school and work with you?” I asked.

  He smiled faintly, almost sadly, and said, “Someday.”

  I wanted him to tell me a story about what we’d do. If I could think about the future when everything would be different, then each boring day at school wouldn’t be so bad. But he said nothing, and I sprawled on the rug and watched the news, which felt more serious even than school. With his eyes locked on the screen, he inhaled slowly through his mouth, the way I did when my nose was plugged, and I wondered if he breathed like this because of something to do with his nose.

  “Bonnie said your nose isn’t real,” I told him.

  “What?” He glanced down at me.

  “She said doctors gave you a new one. How did it get broken?”

  He hesitated, cheeks scrunched up as if he might become angry, though I kept my face curious and unafraid. It wasn’t easy, but it worked.

  “Someone hit me,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a long story. I was coming out of a . . . a bar, and they were waiting for me, and they . . . they hit me in the face with towing chains.”

  “What’s a towing chain?”

  “You use it to pull cars.” He glanced back at the TV, but I had the sense that I was missing a pretty good story. After all, who just went and hit someone in the face with chains?

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  He stared down at me where I lay on the rug. “Well,” he said and cracked a grin, “I gave them the worst beating of their lives. They cried like babies and ran away.”

  I was waiting for the story to go on, but he yawned and focused back on the TV. When had he stopped telling stories the way he used to? He said nothing, and I grew so bored of the man’s head droning away on the TV screen that I left to read at the kitchen table.

  After dinner, I asked my brother what would happen if there was a nuclear war. How did it all work? He focused his large brown eyes on mine, nodded seriously, and took a breath. Then he described a future of cannibalistic humanoids in caves who’d hunt down good humans. The monster humans would eat people because there’d be no animals left. The good humans, though, might not eat at all. Given that I could eat endlessly, it occurred to me that I might become a monster human.

  Later, in bed, I couldn’t bear not understanding all that was happening—the way my parents ignored each other and rarely laughed. I stared at the dark ceiling until the house became quiet and stayed that way for so long I thought I might fall asleep. Then, downstairs, footsteps slowly crossed the wooden floor and just stopped, as if someone was standing and thinking, not sure where to go or what to do next, as if too afraid to move. Even now, without my knowing, so much could be happening. I might wake up and find the world changed—sirens and detonations forcing us underground, faceless creatures capturing me, tying me to a table and brandishing knives.

  In a dream, I crossed a yellow field, running toward my mother, who appeared gray, caught in motion, a colorless snapshot—her hand extended, floating before me as I reached. In the center of the sky appeared a black shape like a fighter jet. It began to spin as, from every horizon, darkness rose, and there was no more light.

  In the morning, my father was gone, and after breakfast my mother said that we were going into town. A bag held her presents, and if ever there were proof of the nonexistence of Santa, it was this: my mother with her receipts, leading us into the mall to return everything my father had bought her.

  Outside the clothing store, she put my brother in charge while she went inside. My sister sang quietly to herself as we watched the crowds surge past Boxing Day signs.

  A slouching woman stopped and stared. After glancing around, she came closer. She had blond, frizzy hair and a long jacket that reminded me of burlap. She asked if we were alone.

  “Our mother is just over there,” my brother told her, repeating the words that my mother had drilled into us.

  The woman’s big eyes rolled from one side of the mall to the other. Instantly, I knew she’d do something repulsively sexual. Both during school assemblies and by my mother, I’d been warned about perverts.

  She slipped three pamphlets from her purse and gave one to each of us.

  My brother blanched. “We can’t,” he told her.

  “It’s all right. Your mother won’t mind,” she said and hurried off, not having exposed her naked body from beneath the jacket after all.

  He stood, hunched, as if he’d returned home with a bad grade. The pamphlet showed two abandoned-looking children in saggy diapers waiting in a doorway as Jesus approached along the sidewalk. He’d probably change their diapers. No, whatever he’d do had to be bad if my mother hated Christians so much. Maybe he’d feed them processed foods. She’d never explained why, if proselytizers came to our house, she slammed the door in their faces.

  She snatched the pamphlets from us.

  “Who gave these to you?” She made a constricted huff like a growl and went to a trash can and tossed them. As she led us out, she searched faces, asking if we recognized the woman. My brother said he didn’t, and I could no longer recall what she’d looked like.

  “Why were you so angry?” I asked her that night as she was tucking me in. I wanted to hate the woman who’d given us the pamphlets, but I didn’t understand why I should.

  “I don’t want you to grow up with that garbage in your head. When I was a kid, I had to go to church. I imagined God was some big, mean guy staring down, and I was afraid to do anything, afraid to be myself or have fun.”

  She told me about her father, how strict he was, as if this were also God’s fault. She said she’d wanted her freedom. The way she told me this—the look in her eyes—made me feel that she was still struggling to be free. She seemed as if she were going to tell me something else, and an expression like pain came onto her face, but she said nothing.

  “Who is God?” I finally asked, just to make her speak. She sighed and explained how some people believed in an all-powerful, judgmental geezer who saw everything we did. Her description was so convincing that I forgot what we’d been talking about before and became a little jealous of this old man’s mental powers. Above all, I was angry at the thought of being spied on, and I told her that I never wanted to take a bath again.

  My sister was lying on her belly with a book, the blinds drawn, her room so dark I didn’t know how she could read.

  “Want to hear a story?” I asked and flopped down next to her.

  “Okay,” she said and turned onto her side. I wasn’t sure why I was bothering her. Vacation had ended and winter dragged on, my parents fighting, all of us busy with our own things, books or music or video games.

  I began to describe a future in which everyone could levitate, but she said, “Tell me about how Bonnie and André met.”

  “Well, she’s from Pittsburgh,” I said and thought of all she’d shared over the years. “Grandma’s mom is German, and Grandpa’s from somewhere else. He made steel. Bonnie didn’t like them because they believed in God, so she ran away to live in nature. Since André grew up really poor, he could do everything—farm and catch fish and even . . . deliver babies.” This expression always sounded funny to me, as if he were a mailman, but now the story I’d been struggling to find became clear. It was about my birth, and I repeated the version he’d often told me. “I was born on the living room couch. André delivered me. The cord was around my neck.”

  “What cord?”
>
  “Babies are born with a rope. Sometimes it feeds them, but sometimes it strangles them. He took it off and blew into my mouth, and then I began to breathe.”

  “Oh,” she said quietly, as if expecting something else, but I couldn’t think of what came next. My story seemed to have started well, but what happened after my birth? Feeling vaguely irritated, I got up and walked away. The next day, after school, she asked me to tell another story, but I said I was busy and left her in the musty silence of the house.

  As I crossed the frozen fields, I wished for spring and that first breathless warmth that was no warmth at all but seemed it after so long in the cold. Dandelions would bloom, like when I was very small and everything was perfect.

  I sat in my favorite place, a grove of oaks that were larger than the other trees. The ground beneath was without weeds, soft and dark and always in shadows in the summer, though now I stared up through the naked branches at the colorless sky. Everyone I knew had died. The house had burned down. The school had been incinerated. I was the hunter, the loup-garou transformed by the forest and the animal power of solitude. In nature, I would survive. The world would end, and when it began again, I’d still be here.

  But when would that happen? My brother liked Dungeons & Dragons, and his Monster Manual described lycanthropy, which turned men into werewolves. Though I’d thought of my father when I read it, I knew that it was too simple—that nothing, not even the end of the world, would happen the way I wanted it to.

  Eventually it grew dark, and my mother’s voice called across the valley from the back porch, my name echoing off the mountains. I started home.

  The snowmelt came suddenly, flooding drainage ditches, covering the fields, water gathering toward our backyard until it shone in a crescent around the slight rise where our house had been built. The sun blazed day after day, and I forgot my frustration and boredom and loved the sense of expectation and change, of possibly having to survive a natural disaster.

  I’d read a book about young people who bonded after society’s collapse. The abandoned cities sent shivers up my spine, the vines that grew through cracked concrete and broken windows, the mountains where the youths sheltered beneath overhangs, staring out over the desolate landscape for a flicker of light.

  Reading made me feel as if I’d swigged my father’s vodka. Did my brother or sister experience this? My brother loved video games, and my sister sang constantly so that her location in the house could be determined according to her volume. My mother always told us to read, but did she know that books made me want to run outside and breathe the air rolling off the mountains, smell the wet fields and drying mud, hear the crunch of onion grass under my feet? Stories seemed like paths. If you went outside and looked, there was the world, just the world, but if you went and looked after reading a story, there was a world where anything could happen, as if beyond the mountains were a hundred countries to which I might go, a hickory cane over my shoulder and my few possessions tied in a red bandanna.

  But there would be no escaping this time. The flood hemmed us in, our house like a frog on a lily pad. Neighbors put out sandbags, and in a few places the water on the road was so high that my father had to drive through it very slowly, afraid of shorting out his engine.

  My mother had gotten two horses a few years earlier and checked on them and on her bedeviling goats. She cooked restlessly, baking crumbly bread in coffee cans so that each loaf came out with the can’s seams printed on it. She made flat, hard cookies that looked like very wet mud thrown at a wall.

  As I studied the flood, imagining all the ways to cross it, she joined me on the back porch.

  “We’re going to leave soon,” she told me, and my heart beat with an excitement so involuntary, so sudden, that it ached.

  “Where?”

  “We’re moving. Just you and me and your brother and sister.”

  “What about André?” I asked, realizing something terrible was happening to my family, though I had no word for it.

  “He’s staying here.”

  “When will we come back?”

  The wind gusted in her hair as she stared beyond the smooth surface of the water to the mountain, her expression like my brother’s as we rushed the train track.

  “We’re not coming back,” she said, her voice almost breaking.

  “Ever?” I didn’t understand. Though I loved the idea of setting out, I couldn’t imagine never seeing the valley again. It was the one place we were sure to return to after our many temporary homes, and I’d never known spring or summer anywhere else. What would we do if we were separated from my father, gone away somewhere strange and new?

  My mother stared off, lips slightly parted so that I thought she might say something else, her eyes narrowed as if to glare past the limits of the sky.

  The next morning, I checked on the flood. I walked out to where the water began. Beneath the surface, the grass appeared distorted, like the bottom of a swimming pool, undulating. Far off, the red-ribboned tops of a few Christmas trees showed, and then there was simply the smooth surface of the deluge, stretching on toward the mountain.

  I wanted to worry that we were leaving, but it seemed impossible—not just because of the flood, but because my parents often said crazy things that never happened. Besides, just before going to work, my father had made a comment that now obsessed me.

  “I bet carp are swimming up from the rivers, right through the fields,” he’d said. “If we take the boat and shine the flashlight in the water, we’ll see them.”

  I couldn’t think of anything but carp—gliding out of the river, nestling in the branches of submerged trees, riding currents through the beams of flashlights.

  The rowboat lay upside down in the shed, and I discussed with my invisible friends whether we should take it and do some exploring. Eleven of them were in agreement, making me suspect that I had eleven invisible friends but maybe only one spirit guide. The guide was concerned. In fact, he sounded a lot like my brother later did.

  “We’re not allowed,” he said.

  “Come on. Just for a little while. There are carp out there.”

  “No. We can’t. We’ll get washed away by the river and die.”

  In the past, my father had been more open to ideas like this, but I suspected that convincing him to do something wild might not be as easy as before.

  “Can we go out in the boat?” I asked him that evening,

  “I’m busy.”

  “But we can see carp.”

  “That’s true,” he said, nodding to himself. “There might be carp out there.”

  I hesitated, knowing what I had to say next.

  “Do you think it would be really dangerous?”

  He looked at me and grinned as if he’d just woken up and was himself again, not that person who cared only about his business.

  “Okay,” he said, “we can go later on tonight.”

  After dark, the moon shone against the water, turning the flood into a silvery plain. In the rowboat, we crossed the hidden fields of Christmas trees as my brother and I took turns aiming the flashlight through the luminous surface. My father kept letting go of the oars and taking it from us, saying we were using it wrong, but he couldn’t find any carp either.

  As he peered down, we sat on the opposite side, trying to counterbalance. His edge of the boat sank dangerously close to the water, but he didn’t seem to care. Did he know we were leaving him? He didn’t show it. Sitting there, saying nothing, I felt what a relief it would be if the end came now, the three of us in the boat, with no choice but to find a new home.

  He shone the light on the eerie shapes of drowned Christmas trees and worried that if the water didn’t go down soon, they would die. We’d had floods before, and afterward, I’d followed him along the rows as he’d pulled up yellow yearling pines, their dead roots slipping from the earth.

  “I’m going to lose a lot of money,” he said, peering over the edge, the oars dragging in the rowlocks.
/>   Then he shut off the light and we just sat, gazing along the gleaming surface to the mountains, the water still, the moon full and blazing all around us.

  A week later, when the waters went down, my father hired a helper from a nearby farm, a young man with a fuzzy, lopsided mustache and bulging biceps who, as a boy, my mother once confided in me, had jumped from the roadside bushes to make cars swerve until he caused a grisly head-on collision. I’d spent a recess describing crushed vehicles, bodies plunging like divers through windshields and flailing over the road, beheaded and skinless, and just the sight of him now made me shiver so badly that my joints rattled.

  But rather than cause more deaths, he helped my father replace the tractor bridge. They finished at sundown and returned to the back porch and each drank a beer. My father was telling him how quickly floods could begin, that he’d seen rivers triple their size in seconds and had almost been killed like this in a Yukon mining camp.

  “I’d just finished my last shift and had a few days off, and there was no way I was going to stay in camp. I wanted to get out and drive into town and have some fun. But a gorge with a river in it separated the camp from the main road where our cars were parked. A wooden footbridge went across, but the snow was melting in the mountains and it was raining so hard the gorge had almost filled. There was a narrow point farther up, not too far upstream, and the water was coming through in surges. I was standing in front of the bridge. I really wanted to leave, but each surge that came through was higher. The water carried uprooted trees that almost hit the bottom of the bridge. I remember watching. I had a bad feeling. I counted the seconds between the surges. One passed, and the water shook the bridge, and then I sprinted. But halfway across I realized I’d waited too long. I heard the roar of the next surge, and I jumped just as the bridge snapped in half. My chest hit the earth, and I dug my fingers in and pulled myself up and ran, because the water was starting to come over the edge.”