by Deni Béchard
I watched her closely, trying to see signs of whether she might leave us, but she kept baking bread and flat cookies, and driving us to school with lunches so hard to chew they made my jaw ache. Maybe she was planning on teleporting away, or just vanishing, moving on to her next life. More and more it became clear to me that anything was possible.
One Saturday, while she was at the psychic church and my brother and sister were with friends, I again went with my father to work. The night before, he’d been arguing with her, and I’d pretended to go to the bathroom. It didn’t sound like she was leaving, but rather as if he was trying to convince her to leave me behind. But all I overheard clearly was him saying, “Deni’s like me. He doesn’t need school.” This was how he started in as soon as we left.
“You and me, we like being in nature and fighting,” he said and cited his own frequent battles as a child, sounding angry, as if the fights hadn’t been fully resolved and somewhere there was a brutish nine-year-old with whom he still had to get even.
“If I stay with you and we travel together,” I asked, “can we go to other countries, too?”
He glanced over. “What do you mean?”
“Can we travel around Africa?”
“Africa?” he repeated. I’d read a story about the descendants of dinosaurs surviving in the interior of Africa, deep in isolated lakes, and I told him about it.
He stared at the road. “That’s probably not a good idea. There are lots of snakes in Africa. Don’t you think it’s nice to go camping and not worry about getting bit?”
As he spoke, he paused between each few words, as if to catch his breath. I pictured snakes coming through the windows of our motor home while we slept, but I was more afraid of him losing his temper.
“I guess,” I said and shrugged, wondering if he was scared of snakes.
He changed the subject to how hard it was to keep his seafood business going, and I made a mental note to check the display in his store and see if any prehistoric fish had accidentally been caught. My mother, he told me, didn’t care if the economy was bad or that the cocksuckers at the bank were making work hard. I pictured bankers throwing rocks, his employees ducking while trying to sell fish. But things couldn’t be going so badly. He’d bought a briefcase and explained how important it was for a successful businessman, showing me its cylinder lock and the tag that said Patent Leather. Besides, if he no longer had his stores, that would be better since we were going traveling.
At his fish market, I didn’t see any lack of money or any cocksuckers. Everyone was nice, and customers were shoving ten- and twenty-dollar bills over the counter.
He checked that his employees were doing their jobs, and he took a wad of cash from the till and put it in his jacket. Then he sat me on a stool with a book, under the watch of the two men who worked there, and he disappeared for an hour with a young, very pretty Chinese woman who also worked for him and whose name I could never remember.
I questioned his employees about whether they might have accidentally cut up any strange, very ancient-looking fish, but they said they hadn’t, so I looked for myself. Inside two bubbling tanks, crabs and lobsters clambered over each other, their pincers held shut with rubber bands. In the display were prawns, speckled trout, thick halibut steaks, silky salmon fillets, bags of fist-size clams, and red snappers with surprised-looking eyes. The creatures on the ice always made me realize how big the world was. Staring at them, I pictured the deep, ancient, glistening dark of the ocean. I began telling the employees how someday I planned to travel around Africa and find the lost descendants of dinosaurs.
“What are you guys up to?” my father asked when he returned alone, the shoulders of his jacket flecked with rain.
“We’re talking about dinosaurs,” I said, then told the employees, “André and I are going to travel and do nothing but fish after my mother leaves and he goes bankrupt.”
Both men blanched and glanced away, but my father’s face became so red it looked painful. In his truck, he grabbed my arm.
“You can’t say those things!” He tried to catch his breath. “You’re lucky. My father would have thrown you through this window.”
I sat perfectly still, showing no emotion, because if I got upset when he was angry, he got even angrier. He let go of my arm and gripped the steering wheel as if to tear it off. Briefly, I pictured him lying in broken glass and wondered about his father.
“It’s okay,” he told me. “You didn’t mean to. You just need to stop talking so much.”
As he began to drive us home, I considered his words. I talked constantly and had never thought this might bother him, that there were things about me he didn’t like. Until now I’d been feeling pretty special since he was spending more time with me the way he used to.
After a while, he said, “I hate those fuckers. I hate the bank.” He told me that he’d planned his revenge. He would rent a safe-deposit box and put a package of fish inside. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think they can legally take it out no matter how bad it smells.”
Later, waiting at a red light, he pointed to a bank and an armored car in front of it.
“You see,” he said, “they bring the money on Friday. That’s when people get paid. They bring their paychecks, and the bank has to have lots of money for everyone.”
I nodded, not sure why this mattered.
As we were nearing home, I began talking again. I’d managed to stay quiet for most of the drive until my tongue began tapping back and forth against my teeth and prodding the roof of my mouth, which tickled. It needed to speak, and I’d been thinking about how my father didn’t like my mother’s spiritual ideas. I wondered how he felt about an all-powerful god staring down on him, knowing everything, even his adventures and other family.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Life’s a big joke. God’s playing a joke on us.”
To me, this made it sound as if God was a bit like him. I asked if he prayed, and he said, “I hate church. I grew up with those fucking priests. I’d never go back.”
“But Bonnie said you see things sometimes.”
“She said what?”
I repeated a story she’d told me. “One time,” she’d said, “he woke up and saw a bright white light above him, and he couldn’t move. He was paralyzed all night.”
“She told you that?” he shouted as we pulled into the driveway. I’d done it again. I’d talked too much.
I cranked the door handle and dropped to the ground and clomped inside.
My mother had just returned with my brother and sister, and they were watching a TV show about amazing people. My father loved Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and That’s Incredible! and he often called us in to explain what was being shown, the chain saw juggler or the parachuting escape artist. This time the host discussed the yogis of India, men who not only could stop their heartbeats but controlled every function of their bodies.
“This is the sort of stuff we talk about at the church,” my mother told us.
I sensed my father’s interest, a lull in the anger he’d brought into the room. He sat shifted forward, as if he might learn something about this mysticism business.
The host explained that to clean their intestines, yogis swallowed long strips of linen that they worked through their digestive tracts. The TV image switched to a small, mostly naked brown man who was feeding linen into his mouth, his Adam’s apple moving laboriously. He looked as if he were trying to eat a very large spaghetti noodle, and he rolled his belly with each gulp. The host said it took hours for the linen to reach the yogi’s intestines. Then the yogi would draw the linen back through his body. The last shot was of him pulling it from his mouth. He smiled as he held it out, black from its journey into his bowels.
My father sat stock still, mouth open.
“That’s shit. That guy’s pulling shit out of his mouth. That’s disgusting!” He picked up the small black book he kept his business numbers in and hurled it at
the TV.
“Go to bed! All of you, go to bed!” he shouted. “That’s fucking disgusting!”
Lying beneath the covers, I wondered what about the yogi had made him so angry. The little man’s actions hadn’t seemed magical at all, but rather like a difficult and time-consuming form of flossing, which I despised.
Summer came and went, my mother and father rarely together, my brother and I reading and playing so much Dungeons & Dragons that we hardly noticed anything else. Then school started again, and we mourned the loss of our free time.
Now everything was definitely changing. My mother and I sat in Baskin-Robbins, and as I ate my ice cream, she explained that she wouldn’t be with my father much longer. She said that she loved me and never wanted to leave me.
“But how do I know what I should do?” I asked and licked a run of melting chocolate off the waffle cone. I had forgotten how good sugary foods could be.
She considered this and, as if choosing her words with care, spoke slowly. “The world is both physical and invisible,” she told me and described how thoughts and moods hung about us like clouds. We shared subtly in the lives of others by crossing paths with them, by breathing the same air. Truths could also come to us like this.
I licked some more of my Rocky Road and gnawed on the cone. Was she telling me that by sitting next to my father and taking deep breaths, I’d know what was best?
“You just need to meditate on the right choice,” she said and smiled, as if, were I to do so, the white light of my soul might flare up like a neon sign in a bar window, spelling out not Budweiser or Molson but Go with Your Mom!
Her hair was graying quickly, and it reminded me of when she’d once picked me up from school after getting a perm. I’d neared our van, then seen the woman with the curly hair and turned away. She’d laughed and called to me, but I’d been afraid. If she left without me now and I didn’t see her for years, maybe the same thing would happen.
“But André and I are going to travel and go fishing,” I told her, suddenly upset, letting the chocolate drip over my fingers.
“What?” she asked, the gentleness emptying from her eyes.
“He’s going to get us a motor home, and we’re going to live in it.”
“That’s bullshit,” she told me. “He’s going bankrupt. He can’t even afford to make payments on his car. He’s lying to you. He lies to everyone.”
Day after day, I tried to think of what else he might lie about. There had been the afternoon that the two men stopped us on the valley road and he lied about not being himself. The police hadn’t come again, so maybe he’d tricked them. I denied the bad things I did, so why wouldn’t he? And he misbehaved even more. The list was long.
He drove like a daredevil.
He’d been in lots of fights.
When we lived by the ferry, he’d knocked a man unconscious and broken a woman’s jaw.
When he was angry, he yelled at my mother.
She’d tried to run away, and he’d just followed her.
Often, he made cruel jokes.
How could I know whether I should stay? If I did, I might starve, since he ate candy bars and Pepsi the way a gerbil lived off brown pellets and water. And yet he was wild and didn’t care what others thought. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. An exciting new disaster might happen at any moment.
I especially loved the stories he used to tell, the way he spoke rhythmically, words transformed, punches and fallen bodies in their syllables. “I kept hitting and hitting this bruiser,” he said, “ducking his punches and jumping up and hammering him, but he had a head like stone and my hands were starting to hurt, so I tripped him. He might’ve been tough, but he went right down.”
And I loved the tricks he played. He called everything an old Indian trick, so that I pictured an old brown Indian telling him, “Don’t forget to blow on a fire to get it to start,” or “If you’re losing a fight, kick him in the balls, then in the face. Who gives a shit if he’s down. Kick his teeth out. It’s a fight.”
“This,” he said, “is my favorite old Indian trick.” He was storing the chain-link fencing he used each winter at his tree lots, and after he stood the rolls on end, he propped cinder blocks on top, just out of sight. If thieves tried to steal the fencing, the blocks would fall on their heads.
Once, on his big lot downtown, he discovered that someone was climbing the corner of the fence each night and stealing a tree.
“Here’s a good old Indian trick,” he said and emptied a bag of dog shit on the ground. He rolled a tree in it, then he propped it in the corner where the thief had been. The next morning, he took me outside the fence to where the tree lay near the road. We laughed long and hard about the thief who’d gotten smeared with shit.
But sometimes his antics didn’t make me feel that good, as when he caught a long-legged spider on his dashboard. We were waiting at a light. It was summer, the windows down, and he said, “Look at that old goat!” In the car next to us, a geezer with thick glasses hunched over his steering wheel as if it were a book in the hands of a nearsighted reader. My father leaned past me and threw the spider onto his bald head.
Now I had to decide. I was sitting on the couch. Hinges creaked in the mudroom and footsteps crossed the kitchen. My father stood in the doorway, the skin on either side of his mouth slack, his gaze too still.
“Is that for school?” he asked.
A Jules Verne novel lay on my lap. It had enraptured me, the idea that a land existed beneath the earth—and why not? How could scientists know for sure? But I said nothing, seeing that this wasn’t the father who wanted to travel and fish, but the one who cared only about his business.
“You read too much,” he said. “You should get some exercise.”
As I tried to think of what to say, a feeling of loneliness, still beyond words, dawned. I’d stopped talking about levitation and mental powers and invisible friends, but I hadn’t considered there might be other things about me that he didn’t like.
“I got in a fight today,” I told him.
“You did?” He raised his eyebrows, then yawned, lifting his forearm to hide his mouth. “That’s good. I’m glad you’re standing up for yourself.”
I’d been trying to be tough at school, using fuck and goddamn to swear kids to tears and run them off. When Matthieu had pulled on my jacket, I’d called him a fuck banana. He’d appeared so dazed that I’d taken the opportunity to punch him.
“Good. That’s good,” my father said, eyeing me as if I might be lying. “You really let him have it, huh?”
“Yeah, I let him have it pretty good.” Hearing myself, I felt that my victory was far grander than it had seemed in the moment, though I wasn’t sure I’d used the swearword right.
My father leaned against the doorjamb, still looking at me, but yawned again. He went into the kitchen. The fridge door opened, bottles clinking.
“Goddamn it,” I heard him say, “there’s nothing to eat.”
I closed my book. I had to make up my mind. Maybe I should leave with my mother. My father definitely wasn’t as fun as he used to be.
He came back, anger all around him, like the smell of cigarettes on a smoker’s jacket. He sat and put the peach-colored phone on the armrest, then lifted the receiver. He swallowed hard and pushed his jaw forward and began to dial.
Seeing his expression, I knew that he was going to swear at someone. The sadness eased from my throat, and an odd feeling of lightness came over me. What was it about words, or the way some of them could contain so much force? No one could swear like him! It was his gift. Each insult came from his stomach, not like a belch but like the sudden act of vomiting, a sound that catches in the throat and burns in the sinuses like bile.
The faint ringing from the earpiece reached me, and a tired tinny voice said, “Hullo.” My father didn’t even introduce himself. He shouted, “Don’t you fucking play games with me!” Then he took a breath so deep I could see all his teeth and the dark lines of his many
fillings and the red of his throat. He yelled, stringing words together, “Motherfucking cocksucking piece of shit, I’ll kick your stupid fucking ass!”
Wanting to sound like this, I forgot I had to decide, and without realizing it, I jumped up and danced on the carpet in victory. He grabbed his black book and threw it at me.
The end would be like a fishing trip, a long drive through the night, dark mountains and washed-out roads, to a dawn over a river where all that mattered began.
I went into the woods and closed my eyes and turned in circles with the intention of getting lost. I had to hone my survival skills. Wandering, I looked for tunnels under bushes and imagined magic portals beneath the low branches of trees.
And then I just sat. There was something I couldn’t understand, that made it hard to breathe, my throat thick with sadness. My father had always told me I was like him, and I did my best not to cry in front of him. But I noticed how my mother watched me sometimes, her brow furrowed, a wetness in her blue eyes, as if just seeing me race through the door might make her cry. She liked it when we talked and I read books, but what did my father want me to be? Crazy sometimes. Quiet at others. It was confusing. It wasn’t fair.
In novels, something bad happens so that the hero has to travel and change, but my life just dragged on. Only when I read did the pressure in my chest go away. As I turned pages, I felt a rush of vertigo, tingling along my arms and face. Even telling stories at school, I became transfixed, sailing further and further into the air, toward the sky, more and more distant from the truth. And once I’d told a story, no matter how outlandish, how embroidered with magic, I knew it was true. I had only to glance at photos from my parents’ first years together to see the past, and the scene that unfolded—that I told everyone—I never doubted.