Cures for Hunger

by Deni Béchard

  “If I dig for you, can I come?” I asked, thinking that finding ancient things was kind of like reading myths. He just nodded and said, “Sounds good to me.”

  As we walked down the long incline of mobile homes, their metal roofs throwing sunlight into our eyes, he asked about my family and how long I’d been here. He couldn’t believe I had no religion, and, like Darwin, he set forth the order of the world: white churches and black churches, bad people and good ones, heaven and hell, a neighbor who shook in his lawn chair because he’d smoked oregano soaked in transmission fluid, a six-toed window washer who slept with all the single mothers, a teenage girl who’d gotten pregnant because the guy skimped on condoms and used Saran Wrap.

  He clued me in on trailer-park characters: the fat black boy whose father brought him a G.I. Joe every week though the boy always tied them to a stake, doused them in gasoline, and torched them next to the windmills and flamingos on his tiny lawn; the pale muscular boy with sunken eyes who we saw surrounded by girls as he lifted his bicycle with one arm, a feat for which, Earl explained, he got laid—what I imagined might be like getting tucked in. He added that the boy’s father had been killed in the field below the trailer park, his head staved in by a two-by-four. It occurred to me that something wasn’t right with the fathers around here.

  “He deserved it,” Earl told me as we crossed the four lanes of highway into the horse pastures. “He was a faggot and kept grabbing people.”

  Americans loved cussing so much I wondered if it was genetic, like eye color. Maybe my mother had passed this on to me, though she didn’t swear much. She did get angry easily, quick to say everyone was wrong and how things should really be done. This was definitely an American quality I had. Thinking about it made me feel like a character in a novel, proud and unashamed. If you didn’t have an obsession and weren’t willing to risk your life for what you believed, you probably belonged somewhere else.

  Over the next hour, each time Earl’s detector bleated, I dug up Civil War treasures: buckles from belts, boots, and harnesses, as well as lead bullets—dozens of them, a few mashed from impact. The thrill of discovery had me panting, hunched, scouring the red clay with my fingers until the object came into sight. This, I suddenly knew, was my purpose. Archaeology! Why hadn’t I realized sooner? I loved mystery, and what could be more mysterious? I felt that we’d soon discover something amazing, a golden statue of Zeus or a Roman helmet.

  An old farmer came out to see what we were up to.

  “I dug up a safe one time,” he said, his eyes eerily blue in his sun-bronzed face.

  “What kind of safe?” Earl tugged at his checkered shirt as if the afternoon heat were unbearable. I leaned close.

  “An old safe,” the farmer said—“a very old safe. It must have been thirty years ago. I was digging a septic field. I found that safe down in the ground, and I’ll be durned if I didn’t spend four years trying to git it open. Maybe five. I used everything. Sledgehammer. Welding kit. But that door wouldn’t budge. So I put it back in the ground.”

  “You did what?” Earl exclaimed. I was practically bent double, as if to gnaw my way through the earth to find that safe.

  “I got annoyed,” the old man said.

  “But there are stories of buried safes with Civil War gold,” Earl told him. “Did it have any markings on it? Do you remember where you buried it?”

  The old man looked off, his lips drawing down as if with thought, or to smirk. He shrugged. “I done forgot. It’s been some time now.”

  Then he walked away, shuffling and bent forward, the baggy brown seat of his jeans hanging off his ass as if beneath he were nothing but bones—a malicious skeleton, one of the Confederate dead risen from the stale earth to torment us.

  The idea of the safe made me crazy. I couldn’t stand it. I lay awake at night and pictured myself digging. I heard the precise moment when the shovel’s blade hit the rusted iron. I felt the jolt in my arm and sat up. I got out of bed as if to go pee and stood in the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked in the mirror.

  “I found a safe,” I told my reflection. “It’s full of gold.”

  Then I shut off the light and went back to bed and pictured myself digging again, waiting to hear the clank of the shovel blade, shivering with anticipation.

  But I still couldn’t sleep, so I took my notebook and went into the bathroom. I sat on the toilet and wrote about a field where Civil War phantoms appeared under the full moon, living out hopeless battles. Buried beneath them was an old safe that the story’s hero, a boy archaeologist, heard about from a spooky old man who vanished into the shadow of the forest. The boy had to find someone to help him dig it up and release the spirits of the dead so that he could claim the gold, but the only person he could ask was his father. I hesitated, pencil poised, trying to decide what kind of father this should be, if he could be trusted with the secret and what he’d do if allowed into the story. Frustrated, I went back to bed.

  Each afternoon, returning from school, I paused at a rise on the trailer-park road. I looked out over the flat roofs—some narrow, some double-wide—beyond the patchwork of cramped yards with rusted hibachis and cannibalized cars—to the field where we’d been prospecting. I hated the farmer for forgetting where the safe was. Only my father would understand. He might be sitting at home sharpening a knife, or lying in wait for my mother in the shadows next to the post office, but he would definitely understand about the safe.

  I couldn’t bear it. His number was in one of the cards he sent, and I went to a pay phone and called collect. We’d talked only a few times since I’d left, briefly, with my mother passing the receiver around, and this was the first time I’d called him on my own. How bad could he really be? My mother and aunt whispered together at night about him, and several times my mother had told me he was dangerous and that we had to keep our lives secret from him. As the phone rang, my heart kicked like a car-struck jackrabbit in its frantic final seconds.

  “Hey . . . Deni . . . ,” he said after he’d accepted the charges. “Are you alone?”

  “Yeah,” I told him, thinking how strange he sounded, raspy and far away. He almost croaked when he talked, as if he’d gotten old.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Well, yeah, but there’s something I wanted to ask you about.”

  “Oh,” he said, his voice suddenly clear. “What is it? What’s going on?”

  “There’s this safe,” I told him. Instantly, I felt on the verge of tears.

  “A safe?”

  “Yeah, a safe.” I repeated the farmer’s story, the iron box in the red Virginia clay, pulsing like a heart just beneath the tawny grass, waiting to be dug up and split open.

  “That farmer—that old guy,” my father asked, “he really doesn’t remember?”

  “No, he doesn’t remember! He doesn’t!”

  My father was silent.

  “That fucker’s lying,” he shouted. “No one just puts a safe back in the ground.”

  “He said he did.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “He said he was frustrated. He tried to open it.”

  “Goddamn it! I would have gotten it open. It’s not that hard.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. It’s easy. Son of a bitch, I wonder what was in it. What a fucking idiot!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He’s an idiot.”

  “That’s right,” he told me. “He’s a goddamn fucking idiot.”

  I laughed. Then he asked how things were going. I talked a bit about school and stupid teachers and fishing and what I was eating these days. There was a long silence, and I realized that this was the moment when he would ask the questions that made my mother angry—what our phone number was or where we lived. But he just cleared his throat and told me he loved me. I said that I loved him, and we hung up.

  I put my forehead against the hot plastic of the phone.

  Had I betrayed her? I hadn’t told him our number or home ad
dress. He hadn’t asked. He’d seemed genuinely interested in the safe—and with good reason! But then I grit my teeth. If he hadn’t been so crazy, we could have stayed. We wouldn’t be here, in a trailer park. Did I hate him? She was terrified of him. There had been the night by the ferry. He’d knocked out the man and broken the woman’s jaw, and I’d seen the bleeding scratches on his face, the blood on his hands.

  This newness—the thrill of this new world—had worn off. Like one of those fat football halfbacks in remedial ed, the blazing sun pushed me to the ground and pulled my pockets inside out and gave me a kick. I dragged myself home, but that night I couldn’t sleep, wondering if I hated him, wondering what was in the safe, or how he knew that safes were easy to open. He and I could dig it up and open it. Inside, there’d be something amazing.

  Behind our trailer was dense, tufted, vine-hung undergrowth, the sort of weedy, stunted forest where, in movies, dead bodies were found. I crouched on the red clay bank of a river whose current moved with the slowness of a seeping wound. Pinwheels of oil and bits of trash and leaves decorated the surface. It looked like wet asphalt after a storm.

  I could feel it in my bones—something terrible was going to happen any day now.

  A hundred snakes were going to bite me. I’d stumble home, bloated blue with poison, my tongue as big as a wet hand towel, my eyes chunks of melting violet Jell-O. I would die and my mother would weep, and my father would say sorry.

  I already had poison ivy blisters around my ankles and wrists and neck. I’d known I was going to get it. Soon I would cut my hand by accident.

  The red pocketknife he’d sent in his latest box of gifts had Vancouver printed on the side. I chose a stick from the shore and began paring away its branches to make a spear so that I could kill a poisonous snake and inspect its fangs. I’d keep the skull next to my bed as a reminder, and this would make me mean. No one would fuck with me anymore. I sawed at the wood, the blade close to my hand as I waited for the moment it would slip.

  “Fuck,” I growled. I’d finished and hadn’t cut myself.

  I grabbed the crotch of my pants and pulled them up and squatted, heels in the mud as I waited for a son-of-a-bitch snake to come and fuck with me.

  “Deni!” My mother was calling my name. I dropped the spear. I snapped the knife shut and ran back toward the trailer.

  My brother and sister were inside, wrangling over toys that had just arrived. My father mailed them to a PO box my mother kept so that he wouldn’t know where we lived—“Not that it would matter,” she’d told me. “He could just wait for me there if he wanted. That worries me sometimes.” He’d been sending packages crammed, with toys often, and she raged that he was giving us hundreds of dollars’ worth of junk but no money for food or winter clothes.

  “Wait for me!” I shouted and slid like a baseball player into the mess of torn packaging. My name had been written on a box with the photo of a Formula 1 racer.

  “Mine, fuckers!” I hollered as I grabbed it.

  “Deni, stop swearing,” my mother said.

  I didn’t look at her. With a few strokes, I shredded the box. The remote-controlled car was bright red, and I slapped it to prove to myself that it was the real thing. When I put it on the floor and pressed the handset, it zoomed across the carpet and slammed into the wall.

  “Whoa!” I shouted. “Check out its power!”

  “Guys,” my mother called. “I want you to meet someone.”

  A short, gray-haired man had appeared in the trailer suddenly, like a ghost.

  “This is Dickie,” she said.

  He had the coarse face of a drinker, the wire glasses of a smart kid, and cramped biceps like G.I. Joe. His black Camaro was outside, and to my amazement, he sat at the table, lit up a Winston, and held it loosely in his lips, squinting through the smoke like a withered Marlon Brando.

  “What’s the goodies you got there?” he asked.

  “Presents from my father,” I said.

  He blinked and glanced at my mother.

  “Wait a sec. I forgot I brought something myself.”

  He went to the Camaro and came back carrying a Styrofoam package of chicken. I’d read a book in which a country boy took a pullet to a brothel, and from Dickie’s expression, I half expected my mother to dance around in her bra.

  But we were suckers. We gathered around the stove as she performed her alchemy—the flabby, translucent chicken breasts becoming prime white pieces the likes of which we rarely saw. The cramped kitchen smoked up with the fleshy reek of a truck stop, the sizzling as loud as rain on the trailer’s metal roof.

  I would have felt grateful, but Dickie ate quickly, and I was just emptying my plate when he speared the last morsel from the pan. I wanted to jab my fork in his face.

  “Are you a window washer?” I asked, curious to see how many toes he had.

  “What?” my mother said and explained that he worked for a phone company and she’d met him on a blind date. Afterward, she told us to go to our rooms.

  “Okay,” I said and took my book bag. But I left the red racer on, parked under the table.

  I slouched to my room and sat on my bed and waited, holding the handset. My brother began his homework but glanced at me. I grinned. He raised an eyebrow.

  Though the walls were thin as milk carton, the eavesdropping wasn’t great. Dickie made small talk. He told my mother he’d had eight coffees while hanging out at the watercooler. She said, “Oh.” I wished she’d tell him something shocking about my father—why she was so afraid and why we lived in Virginia. But she didn’t. Then it got real quiet.

  When the silence lasted almost a minute, I hit the accelerator on the remote control.

  The engine made a zinging sound, the car banged into a wall, and my mother screamed.

  I stuck my head out the door and looked at them and said, “Heh, heh.”

  “Outside! Go outside!” she shouted.

  Dickie was smiling his yellow teeth at me, but his eyes were as still and unentertained as nailheads.

  “Boys,” he said, and cleared his throat and swallowed.

  Evicted, I took my remote-controlled car into the early evening. I revved it along the street, making it do swift 180s and 360s.

  Normally, I didn’t think much of the toys. They arrived, and I played with them until I got bored. But the car impressed me, its engine powerful, and I knew that my father had gone out of his way. This bugged me. If he really was bad, then why should I accept these presents?

  More than six months had gone by since we’d left, and I’d never imagined that my mother would find another man. Whenever I thought of my father, I got angry, then remembered that I loved him. What was he doing now? Living in the same house, watching TV by himself, eyes cold and unfriendly? An image came to mind of him in a field, standing expressionless like a statue I’d seen in a book on archaeology, a figure alone in a vast desert, the face almost worn away. Nothing about him had ever made sense. He was too hard to think about, and I wanted to forget him. But the red car zoomed along the street, hopping when it struck cracks. It was a pretty amazing present. Why couldn’t he be all good or all evil, like in a fantasy novel, not this mishmash of confused feelings?

  A hunched, slightly bowlegged boy approached, head swiveling as he looked for the source of the car’s shrill rev. His hair was buzzed close in the front and at the sides, long in the back. His squat face, blemished and sprouting a patchy beard, made his bug-eyes seem all the more prominent. Dickie must have looked like this when he was a boy.

  He stopped, his gaze following the zigzags and straightaways of the red racer, his head moving like that of a cat watching a bird.

  “You’re gonna give me that car,” he blurted.

  “What?”

  “I’m gonna take it.”

  I pushed the antenna down in the handset and went to stand next to the car.

  “My dad gave it to me,” I said. “You’re going to have to fight me if you want it.”

  He a
ppeared to consider this, his little whiskery face chewing at the thought.

  “Well then,” he said, “I’m gonna go get my daddy’s gun and shoot you.”

  I picked up the car and ran. I entered the trailer as Dickie and my mother were kissing, one of his hands reaching into her blouse.

  “They’re going to shoot me!” I shouted.

  I raced for my room, leaped into bed, and closed my eyes, clutching the car, its hot engine against my chest.

  CROSSING WIDE SPACES

  Not long after my mother met Dickie, we all got hepatitis A from devouring a dip that had soured for days on my aunt’s table. While my mother was at work, Dickie showed up and took us to his house, jauntily saying that we’d be better off under his care. That evening, she picked us up in a fury, hair disheveled, the first pallor of illness in her face.

  “How dare you take my children without my permission!”

  “Hey, hey, I’m sorry—”

  “No, don’t you think for a second you know what’s best for them. If you want to help, you ask me. You call me. I’ll tell you where they belong.”

  He kept saying please and sorry, something my father never would have done. I expected her to throw him out, but he stayed, taking care of us, doing what she asked. Not long after, we moved in with him, into a brick rambler near Bealeton, a town that was little more than the intersection of two highways, a 7-Eleven, and a makeshift flea market with booths of pirated heavy-metal cassettes, secondhand tools, and Elvis memorabilia. Thirty feet of lawn separated our house from Route 28, and the fields beyond our backyard were overgrown, strewn with trash, and slated to be razed for a shopping center.

  My mother, who’d never married, because my father had refused, tied the knot with Dickie in a courthouse pit stop, their only expenditures a ring and a new dress. Over the next three years, she accompanied him to annual sales conferences in New Orleans and Ocean City. He had two weeks a year for vacation, and we visited his family farm near Canton, Ohio, where his nephew had his uniform number shaved into his crew cut and I learned to make a muffler out of beer cans. The men fished at night, drinking as they jacklighted carp, shooting them with a bow and arrow. Whenever I expressed boredom, Dickie handed me an ancient bolt-action rifle and sent me to eliminate groundhogs, whose holes could break a horse’s leg, though the pastures had long been unused, given over to a few rusted oil jacks that wearily raised and lowered their prehistoric birds’ heads.