Cures for Hunger

by Deni Béchard

  The only constant those years was the van. We didn’t eat meals together, so we never seemed a family more than when we were on the road. If Dickie drove, we became prisoners, the van suddenly a box, a fight brewing, electricity in the air as before a summer storm. But like my father, he couldn’t handle it, complaining that the wheel had too much play and felt like driving a boat. My mother sailed it between homes and school and work, used it as a bus for a day care where she worked, and refused offers by a local mechanic who wanted its massive engine for his race car. Her obese coworker at IBM broke the back of the passenger seat, and from then on we drove with my mother sitting up and the passenger reclined, our conversations looking like therapy sessions.

  Sometimes, from the back, I stared down on cars piddling along behind. One was a state trooper’s on Interstate 66. Remembering my father’s stories, I gave him the finger, and he pulled us over, inspected the van, and questioned my mother about its origins and registration.

  Often, though, I waited for the feeling I loved: not just the motion of the highway, but a luxurious sense of loss. Sitting in the back—always in summer, with a window open, air whipping through and stirring up dust—I smelled the places we’d lived, the hay and grain for the farm, the stacks of fresh pine for building stalls. As we traveled, it seemed as if, for as long as I could recall, I’d wanted to set out and never return.

  When I was thirteen, I walked to school, relishing this time alone. After rainy nights, passing cars fanned moisture against my face. Or warm afternoons, I took a shortcut home through farmland, breaking dry stalks in my fingers, staring out over yellow fields gone to seed, the tall, rangy trees on windbreaks like images from the African savannah.

  But wandering the halls, I cautiously eyed the clusters: rednecks and metalheads, preps and nerds, army brats with “Nuke Kaddafi” pins on their jean jackets. Sometimes I hung out with white kids, sometimes with black kids. Eventually, they all told me I was weird and to go away. My mother’s talk about purpose made me surly. She’d forced me to take French 1, and even though it was ridiculously easy, whenever the teacher asked me a question, I’d say, “I don’t know,” then shrug and look off. I had no idea why I’d even learned this language that my father hated or what it had to do with his life in the first place. Nights, I dreamed that long black hair covered my body and I played football, though in reality I couldn’t. My mother had banned me from violent sports not only because it was for brutes but because we had no insurance.

  Only when I read or wrote did I feel calm. Was it like this for my siblings? My brother played video games as soon as he came home from school, his blinds drawn, his room a dim cavern. My sister sang behind her closed door, listening to the radio.

  It seemed as if none of us had stopped changing since we’d crossed the border. My mother was different each time I blinked: cutoff jean shorts, a yellow halter top, a tight perm, then, before a dinner with Dickie, a narrow blue dress with heart-shaped mesh that showed a hint of cleavage, her hair wavy. The next morning she’d have on pleated trousers and a tight-waisted blouse, a steel barrette at the back of her head. Sometimes she talked differently, laughed differently, as if trying out a new voice.

  “You all have a purpose in life,” she reminded us when she convoked an evening talk—a recent idea of hers, since communication was important.

  As she had for years, she spoke not to middling students but seminal thinkers. My sister had music in her blood. She could pick up an instrument she’d never seen and play a song as if there’d been cellos and pianos in the womb and she’d been waiting all these years to find them again. My brother was a computer genius. He’d befriended a few rural pioneers of the Commodore 64 and scored among the best in the state math exam. Myself, I’d be an archaeologist and learn as many languages as Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered Troy.

  Later that night, Dickie disagreed.

  “I had lots of dreams, too,” he confided, “but that stuff just doesn’t happen to everybody. I wanted to be a pilot. Look where I am now. Besides, you’re lazy.”

  I shrugged. Normally I argued with him, but maybe he was right.

  “I saw you rebuild that radio the other day,” he said. “You’d be a good mechanic. You should talk to the guy at the junkyard and see if he’d hire you.”

  Life was so pathetic that I couldn’t formulate a counterargument. In the new age, everything would be better, but I was getting tired of waiting for Armageddon.

  “I have something important to say,” my mother told us at our next evening talk. “There’s a custody battle between your father and me. He’s trying to get the right to see you, and I’ve offered reasonable terms. But he’s refused, so I’m asking for full custody and no rights for him. I don’t trust him. He might take you away and run off.”

  She paused and very slowly looked at each of us in turn. “How do you feel about this?”

  None of us spoke. Whenever she mentioned my father, a sense of danger hung about us. He seemed unreal now, like something from long ago, the memory of a summer storm with its hail and hot rain and thunder. When I thought of him, I had the same disorientation that comes after a dream—not sure what day it was, what time, the uneasy sense that there was something I was trying to understand. At the borders of my life—in the highway fading to the gray smudge of distance, in the junior high rules that could be broken with a curse or a fight—I sensed him, as if he stood just out of sight, waiting.

  The next morning, in English class, we had a substitute teacher, a goateed young prep from DC. I was reading a book about the discovery of ancient cities, and after class, I loitered and told him that I planned on being an archaeologist and a writer.

  “No way, man,” he said, “don’t do that. Archaeology is boring. A friend of mine’s at the Smithsonian now, but he used to be in the desert. He said it was the most boring thing ever. He was out there four years, living off warm martinis and antidepressants.”

  Though I guessed antidepressants might be like antifreeze, I was pretty sure that martinis were a sort of rodent—maybe small ones. I’d read about early North American fur trappers shipping martini pelts back to Europe, and I had no intention of eating such things just so I could be an archaeologist. Besides, I liked writing better.

  In the clamor of the cafeteria, I sat with my notebook. I didn’t know how a custody battle worked, so I couldn’t write about it. I’d tried a story about running away and daydreamed constantly about fleeing school or home, but I realized I had no idea what was out there, what would really happen when I left.

  My mother and brother often exchanged fantasy novels or knocked at my door, offering me tomes with half-naked elfin princesses on the cover. Like drug pushers, they kept at it until I got addicted and had to finish each epic series with them. There was always an impending confrontation between good and evil, a world that would be made barren and empty or that would be born again, and this appealed to me, that something definite would happen. But above all, in fantasy, you could just set out, and life was a little like my father’s adventures: strangers and random fights and new landscapes. Briefly, my mind wandered to what else he might have done, to what could possibly make my mother feel that he was so dangerous.

  Mandy, a pretty brunette with feathered hair and a short rollerskating skirt, sat nearby, and I told her I was writing a fantasy story about a wanderer with no identity. She just forced a smile, lifting her cheeks as if squinting into the sun, then turned away.

  Maybe my mother was wrong and I didn’t have a gift or purpose. I wanted to do something, anything. But even if I wrote my story now, nothing would change.

  At the next table, two boys were talking about sex, one saying that the girl, a cheerleader, had put her feet behind her head. In my notebook, I began to sketch a tiny naked woman even though I’d probably never see one in the flesh. Ever.

  After school, while other boys were busy destroying their uninsured knees playing football, I sat outside, penciling more naked women, dark littl
e graphite V’s between spread legs, tits like U’s with a dot in them. The women were pretty realistic, I thought. I was getting excited looking at them. Maybe this was my gift.

  On my way home, I passed through the makeshift flea market. When I stopped to look at Quiet Riot and Metallica bootlegs, the man there noticed my notebook. He grabbed it and called the guys manning the booths of tools and Elvis statues. They laughed and snorted, pausing to wipe their mouths with the backs of their hands.

  “I’ll give you ten cents for each page you bring me,” the bearded, overall-wearing proprietor of the tool booth said. “But I like variety, so keep them good.”

  Each day after school, I brought him a few pages, but soon thereafter the booths were shut down to make way for the shopping center, and the porn market dried up.

  Dickie was baking cookies for an office party. It was the only thing he could cook, and he had a pair of red socks, like ceremonial trappings, that he wore for this activity. They had rubber grips so he didn’t slip on the linoleum, as if baking were a high-risk procedure.

  I was hanging around because I’d heard him and my mother whispering about the custody battle. Given that I’d unsuccessfully eavesdropped on the details, I thought maybe I could pry something from him.

  “What do you think of the court case?” I asked while the cookies were puffing up in the oven. But he was opening a box he’d received in the mail.

  “Check these out.” He showed me dozens of ziplock bags containing white powder. His father had sent them.

  “Cool,” I said. “You’re dealing drugs.”

  “Hey, watch your mouth.”

  “Okay. What’re they for?”

  “Peeing.”

  “What?”

  “Peeing while I’m in the car.”

  I knew that he carried coffee cans for the DC rush hour. He also kept a life-size doll that my mother had made for my sister, but he put it in the passenger seat so he could drive in the HOV lane. His job seemed to have robbed him of dignity. I’d always felt that adults had the freedom that I longed for, but now I was seeing how wrong I’d been.

  He returned from the bathroom. The powder had turned to gel. Therefore, I deduced, the piss couldn’t spill. He held the bag to the window, the sunset making his congealed urine blaze like million-year-old amber.

  “Jeez,” he said, “this is great stuff.”

  I wasn’t sure why I was so determined to find out about the custody battle, but I sensed that there had to be more to it than what they’d told me. I almost never talked to my father, maybe once every six months, and when I did, he’d try to tell a few stories: about one of his dogs that ran away and how he spent a day wandering the woods until he found it dead next to some poisoned meat left out to kill wild animals; or about how he bought a van with an engine problem, smoke pouring from the muffler, and a stupid police officer stopped him and said he didn’t want a van like that on his highway. My father told him, “It’s not your highway. I’m not breaking the law, and you’re keeping me from taking my van to get it fixed.” The stupid cop left, and my father kept driving the van like that, the engine using almost as much oil as gas. I always got interested if he was telling stories, but when he stopped, we didn’t have much to say. He sounded tired and far away, though memories of wildness lingered, our adventures so unlike my boring existence now. No one else had seemed so full of life.

  “Do you think the court case is necessary?” I asked Dickie.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He jiggled the bag of urine. “The military must have invented these for pilots. The military makes all the best stuff.”

  Since he wasn’t answering questions about the custody case, I asked what it was like to be in the military.

  “You’re too much of a pussy for the army,” he said.

  “Yeah? Thanks. Did you ever kill anyone?”

  “Just once,” he said. “I was putting up telephone poles in Vietnam, and some guys came out of the woods and shot my partner. I shot them.”

  “Really?” I sat down, ready to be enthralled.

  He put on his white mitts—the ones no one else was allowed to use—and took out the pan. When he made cookies for work, he didn’t share. There was no point asking, though he paraded them around. He did this, I knew, because he was itching for a fight. Someone shat on him at the office, and he came home hankering to shit on us. My mother had warned me that he had a bad temper but a good heart, as if this were a complicated medical condition.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “You just shot them?”

  “Yeah.” Then he told a story about the friend who’d been shot, how one time they were drunk and goofing off. The friend had accidentally stabbed Dickie through the hand with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

  “Why were you putting up telephone poles in Vietnam?” I interrupted.

  “Because they needed them.”

  “Is that how you got into the phone business?”

  “No. That’s just a coincidence.”

  I sighed. The story sucked. There was no hope of getting details—about the custody battle or my father or even what must have been a grisly war scene.

  The Pledge of Allegiance and pickup basketball, pep rallies, fights and cigarettes, cheap beer snuck into football games, a black cheerleader who disappeared and haunted us from the backs of milk cartons. Life had taken a reliable shape.

  The summer before ninth grade, I worked any job I could find: mucking stalls on a horse farm, checking fence lines for breaks and repairing them, bucking hay. Back among the tribal rivalries of the junior high, my improved girth won me some respect.

  “Farm work will turn you into a man,” Dickie told me when I visited him in his basement redoubt, and he confided what a badass he’d been at my age. “I stole cigarettes from my dad. If I had a date, I stole flowers from the graveyard. If someone messed with me, I hit him when he wasn’t looking.”

  I nodded. I supposed that a sucker punch was kind of like stealing a punch.

  “I have to go take care of my poor man’s Corvette,” he said in an at once self-deprecating and proud fashion, and he went outside to change the oil on his Datsun, which he’d bought after selling his Camaro.

  Alone in the basement, I took a pack of his cigarettes from the carton on the shelf and went up to my room, where I put it in my book bag.

  After school, to undo my reputation as a bookworm, I hung out under the overpass and shared the cigarettes. I befriended Travis and Brad, both metalheads, though Travis was a redneck and Brad an army brat who bragged about unverifiable sexual exploits from his years in Germany and liked to speculate about what had really happened to Hitler’s bones. I asked about their fathers. Brad’s was always at a military base. Travis’s was on welfare and spent his days in a room with a single upholstered chair and walls of narrow shelves that he’d built himself. He’d filled them with cassettes in plastic cases, each one containing a sermon. He sat in the chair for hours, listening to the word of God.

  Sometimes, I told them my father’s stories about fighting over a woman or driving a Model T on railways, then mixed and matched, taking away the Model T’s brakes or having my father bite his enemy’s nose. Speaking, I felt that weightlessness, the way words made everything possible. Brad and Travis saw my eyes get feverish and laughed. We got into pushing contests with our puffed-out chests, heads cocked back, about six inches between our eyes as we reeled back and forth, looking like roosters.

  Weekends, we roamed the county, drinking what we could shoplift, getting into fights. We went to carnivals where the scene was so country that the babies crying sounded like part of the music. Hayseeds stumbled past with the swagger and eye-bulge squint of cartoon hound dogs as we drank ourselves sober from the spigot near the refreshment booth, splashing our faces. We stood in the shadows comparing knives.

  Walking home late, I let the wind off passing trucks buffet me. When a solitary rig drew close, I timed its approach and stepped
into the highway, just far enough that I was inches from it and could see the shaking, rushing metal blur past my face. My heart hammered, a thin acrid sweat breaking on my skin and drying just as quickly in the night air.

  I’d been thinking of my father more and more. In his stories, he hitchhiked or drove cross-country, took dangerous jobs in the wilderness, or fought strangers to protect himself. No one else I’d met had a life like that. If he was living here instead of me, bored of school and tired of being at home, would he just stick his thumb out and catch the first ride and see where it took him, then figure out how to survive?

  Eventually, even the highway quieted but for the occasional car sweeping down from the overpass, its headlights dwindling filaments against the empty dark.

  I crossed through the unlit field behind my house, having forgotten it had been bulldozed, deep trenches cut into the earth for the cement footers of the shopping center, so that I had to move cautiously, as if infiltrating a war zone.

  Daily, Dickie watched me when he thought I wasn’t looking. I could see him contemplating the potential excesses of my badass behavior.

  “This guy started a fight,” I told him and described some pushing and how I’d held the kid’s arms until he backed off.

  Dickie nodded. He was clearly undecided.

  “I’ve been there before,” he said.

  He’d told me about getting in trouble at school. Detention. Drinking and fights. Soon, my exploits would match his, and he’d see me as a badass in my own right. Maybe then he’d tell me what my mother wouldn’t about the custody battle. It seemed unfair that he of all people knew more about my father than I did.