by Deni Béchard
Walking the halls of the junior high, I held my shoulders stiffly, an electric tension in my spine. I felt that if I looked right or left, I’d go crazy, swinging and kicking.
So that I’d be late to class, I waited in the hall, hoping the intentional tardiness might draw the girls. But everyone saw me as a bookworm acting out. The rednecks shook their heads. There was a rural caste, and I confounded them. Still, I was diligent.
I slouched in my chair, wearing two-dollar shoplifted sunglasses with the tag still on the reflective lens. I took out a mechanical pencil and leaned over to the girl next to me.
“I need my fix,” I whispered.
I clicked the shaft of lead out until it looked like a syringe. Then I slapped the inside of my arm. I had an audience now. I held the button and pressed the tip against a fat vein. The lead slid back into the canister, appearing to stab my flesh. I rolled my eyes and kicked my legs and whispered, “Oh yeah, baby, oh yeah,” before I died in a blissful OD.
“Guess what?” I told Dickie that evening, leaning against his tool shelf.
He stood at his workbench, spraying WD-40 lubricant into the receiver of the telephone. It had been staticky, and he thought this might help. “Yeah?”
“I got detention. I got paddled in school.”
“What?” He turned toward me.
I explained how the vice-principal had hit me three times across the backs of the thighs with a large wooden paddle drilled with holes for aerodynamics. School rumor had it he’d been in the big leagues.
I was about to describe my indifference after the punishment, how I’d said, “Whatever,” and slouched out, but Dickie’s lips drew back from nicotine-stained teeth.
He shoved me, and the back of my head hit the wall. He lunged and gripped my throat, pinning me there. My face pulsed, the room darkening and his furious grin expanding, caught as if in a bubble. He squeezed, digging his fingers, his palm crushing down on my windpipe. My eyes strained as if they would pop.
“You little shit,” he said. “You need to learn a thing or two. If you ever act out again, I’ll kick your ass.”
The skin of my face felt like it would split.
“And I know you’re taking cigarettes. If I ever catch you, I’ll beat you senseless.”
But he still wasn’t done. I was sputtering, my tongue between my teeth.
“Not so tough, huh? When you’re ready, you come get me. We’ll see who wins.”
The instant he let me go, I ran up the stairs. I was coughing, holding my throat. I slammed my door behind me, then stood there, panting.
My father sent cards often, and in each he wrote his number, as if afraid we hadn’t received the previous one, or maybe because it often changed. I found one in the mess on my floor.
I opened the window and let myself down, then ducked across the yard and ran to the 7-Eleven.
But even as he was answering, I realized that I couldn’t ask him for help, because he was crazy. And yet how much worse than everyone else could he really be?
“Hey, Deni,” he said, sounding confused and sleepy.
“Hey,” I said. He asked how I was doing, and I said, “Okay. Everything’s going pretty good. I don’t like school, but things are okay.”
I spoke as if nothing had happened. If I told him what Dickie had done, he’d come here and kill Dickie. I knew that with more certainty than anything I’d ever known.
Since I had no idea what to say, I told him that I’d pierced my ear. I said this as if it were the most natural choice, and he said, “Yeah, that’s popular now, isn’t it?”
The truth was that a month before, I’d been at the 7-Eleven with Dickie, and the pimply cashier had a pierced ear. Dickie had told me that if I ever did this, he’d kick me out. The next week, at the mall, I had it done, and when I returned home, he stared but said nothing. In homeroom, my teacher made me wear a Band-Aid on my earlobe, and I told my father this last detail. He coughed and said, “That’s stupid. What an idiot. Why do people do such stupid stuff?” Then he was quiet. He was just listening, waiting.
Pressure was building in my chest. I had so much to ask. The breathless desperation was like the desire for motion that made me walk the highway just to watch semis pass in the dark.
“Wouldn’t you like to come see me?” he said.
I didn’t answer. This was the question he used to ask when my mother drove my brother, my sister, and me to a phone so that we could talk to him. He’d say this, and one of us would start crying, and she’d take the phone from our hand and hang it up.
When he spoke again, he sounded drunk. He sounded like he might cry.
“I held you in my hands.”
“What?”
“When you were born,” he said. “I delivered you.” He’d told this story often years before. We’d be night fishing for catfish, and he’d glance over, his look a mix of fondness and concern, and he’d tell me about the umbilical cord around my neck and how angry he’d been at my mother for not wanting to go to the hospital. He’d held me and massaged my chest and blown into my mouth over and over until I began to breathe. That he was telling this now made me feel that he knew everything about me.
“I wanted you to be born in the hospital,” he said, “but your mother had those goddamn ideas of hers. She was afraid of doctors. She hated everything that was modern.”
He hesitated and said that on the day of my birth, she’d left the kitchen a mess and he’d had to wash a pot to boil the scissors. He used to tell me this detail when I was little, and that she hadn’t washed the dishes in time for my birth always seemed grievous. But I smiled now. It was strange that he told the story the same way, that he hadn’t changed.
“She never was much good in the house,” he said. “But I’m the one who brought you back to life, goddamn it. I held you in my hands.”
That night, in a dream, I was alone in the valley. A bear came toward me across the fields, and I ran, calling out to my father. But there was only our distant farmhouse and sheds, dark against the land that unfurled below the mountains.
In detention, I hunched over The Grapes of Wrath.
My history teacher had told me to read it for extra credit. Forget archaeology’s scurrying martinis and engine-fluid beverages. The bliss of desert solitude, of crossing wide spaces, could be had with no profession at all. I could be a drifter! The more I wanted to set out, the more I thought about my father. As Steinbeck’s characters broke laws and wandered the continent, I tried to understand what drove them. What had driven him? What drove me? This mystery gripped my brain.
“Everyone pay attention!” It was Mrs. Henley, our Irish detention monitor. Boys claimed she smoked pot. She was a poet and had delinquents give what she called poetry slams.
“Get out a sheet of notebook paper. If you say one word crosswise, I’ll send you to the office for a paddling so quick your head will spin. Now write whatever you’re angry about. Write what’s making you crazy. Don’t worry about grammar and that stuff.”
After we finished, she stood in the back of the room in her baggy housedress, her cheeks puffy as if from sleep, loose strands of hair hanging about them.
Large boys with faces smudged from shop class read poems like “Runaway,” “Juvie,” or “Foster Home.” I wanted to write about how, reading Steinbeck, I’d realized all I didn’t know about my father and his past, his family, and his reasons for everything he’d done. But I’d be embarrassed to tell the other kids these things, so I scrawled a short poem called “After the End of the World.”
We walked to the lectern with lowered heads, appearing angry, and we listened to each other without looking.
I clutched my poem in my fist so that I had to uncrumple the sheet to read.
desolation
a vast space
crossing through
alone
I went and sat down. No one looked at me.
A big farm boy with shoulders like a beam got up and read: “We pass like grain through
a sieve, a few held back and thrown away.”
I clenched my fists and had to think about my foot in its sweaty sock to keep from tears.
After detention, I caught up with him outside and socked him in the arm.
“What the fuck?” he hollered.
“Fucking poet,” I said.
He shoved me and drove me into the grass, the inside of his arm squeezing my neck. I jabbed my elbow repeatedly at his gut and threw a few punches over my shoulder, with the same awkward motion as scratching my back, but kept missing his face.
Then I stopped swinging, and we both lay there, gasping for air.
The custody battle was over.
“I won,” she told us. “The judge denied him even visiting rights.” Legally, my brother, my sister, and I had to wait until we were eighteen to see him, but she thought fifteen more reasonable. She said we could then decide for ourselves.
That evening, I sprayed WD-40 in my door hinges. She was calling her friends, and I crept out, lingering at the top of the stairs, then slinking down to her room like a predator.
“It’s because of his past,” she said. “He’s not even allowed across the border.”
I was so excited that it took all of my self-control to make it back to my room quietly. Not allowed across the border? Nothing could possibly sound more menacing or mysterious. Was I dreaming? I had the impression that my life was suddenly as exciting as I’d wanted.
And on my next outing, she said, “. . . he lost because of his record . . .”
Record? I hovered on the steps, trying to make out other words, my heart beating faster and faster. Did she mean like something with the police? Was he that bad? Or was it just because of the fight he’d been in at the ferry crossing? I crept back to my room and shut the door.
Never had I more desperately wished that the powers of the mind were real—that I could read her thoughts and know the truth about my father. But humans were so hateful that the very fabric of society depended on not knowing what went on in other people’s heads.
I sat at my desk. Why did I even need to write? Behind everything I wanted, I sensed an impulse, deep inside me, like light filling the emptiness, a longing so rooted, so absolute in my certainty of it, that I pictured holy men in fantasy novels lighting fires to sacred powers. I knew that the messiness of life could be made perfect in a poem. All the lost places and people could be saved in a story. And just as stories reached into the past, they opened out into my future, as if I wrote to show myself who I could be. I got up and put on my shoes. I lifted the window screen and swung myself to the ground too quickly, my hand catching on the aluminum frame. Blood ran along my palm as I crouched in the dark, holding it, willing the pain away. An image came to me, startlingly vivid.
When I was six, my father had cut his hand working on a mower. I went into the bathroom to see him cleaning the wound. I climbed onto the toilet seat to look into the sink. There was the surprise, the pleasure at the sight of his cut, the way his fingers worked around it as blood fell in ribbons, darkening the water. Neither of us spoke, both absorbed in the slow, serious work.
Then he opened the gash with his fingers and showed it to me, letting the blood rush up to clean it before he closed it with his thumb.
It was a summer day, the fragrance of cut grass and mower exhaust through the window screens, and the brilliance of his blood and how I loved him.
There was something else I had to understand.
Tractor-trailer rigs idled on the side of the highway not far from the 7-Eleven. Diesel exhaust misted and blew past the cab lights.
“Hey,” I said to a man waddling back to his rig. He was clutching four bags of chips, several large bottles of Dr Pepper, and a grease-stained paper bag.
“Yeah?”
“You going to Memphis?” I asked.
“Sorry, kid, I’m just heading to Roanoke.”
To each trucker, I asked the same question, keeping my bandaged left hand in my pocket. I was almost fourteen, but I claimed to be sixteen and homeless. I was going to Memphis to stay with a cousin. I’d seen the city on the map, not so far away and yet in the heart of the country, flush with the Mississippi, which cut the continent in half.
Most of the truckers said they were heading elsewhere, but a husband and wife team heard me out. As I spoke, they gave each other dubious looks. Then he shrugged.
“What the hell,” he said. He had sparse red hair and a scar like a divot in his cheek, another above his eyebrow. He’d done worse himself, I knew. He understood.
The tractor trailer had Oklahoma plates. The man said we’d be passing through Memphis in eleven or twelve hours. My mother had long ago ceded my independence, letting me be away entire weekends so long as I showed up on Sunday night. She might be angry that I hadn’t told her where I was going, but that wasn’t unusual anymore.
I kept track of signs as we gusted down Route 17 past Warrenton, then caught the ramp west onto Interstate 66 for a short jaunt before heading south on I-81.
Past the dark Appalachian ranges and vales of scattered house lights, through Virginia into Tennessee, I sensed the continent spreading before us. The man’s wife slept in the cab’s bunk as he shared his sandwiches with me and I invented stories about my cousin in Memphis. I told him how my stepfather had kicked me out, which seemed inevitable, written in my destiny.
Dawn breathed pale light over the countryside, as if we were gazing through misted glass. But no matter how I thrilled at all I saw, fear rumbled in my gut. I ate chicken-salad sandwiches until the cab smelled like mayonnaise and the man said, “Well, let’s save some for later.” I told stories of every near fight I’d had, every teacher and kid who’d done me wrong. Then I hesitated, certain that I had other stories, better ones, but not sure what they were, which ones were important enough or would sound true.
The sun flared at the horizon, not quite behind us, the light warm against my cheek, and as we drove, the landscape outside my window flickered beyond the tall roadside trees like the frames of an old film, clipped moments of stillness stitched together.
A few hours later, the woman joined us in the cab, the pouches under her eyes so swollen it looked as if her eyeballs were riding in boats.
“Where do we drop you off, kid?” she asked and drank coffee, horked and swallowed. It crossed my mind that my jawing could have made it hard for her to sleep.
“Soon,” I said, squinting at the next roadside sign. Inside my skull, anxiety began to wail like feedback at the end of a heavy-metal song, when the guy in torn jeans shoved the electric guitar in front of the speakers. I pretended to recognize the names on signs.
“Not much further . . .” I wet my lips, wondering how I’d get back. It seemed as if there had been only three major turns, aside from some merging and interconnecting interstates near Knoxville. I could manage all that. I was sure I could.
The couple glanced at each other. A look of worry flitted between them, and the feedback behind my eyes ramped up.
“Here. This one,” I said.
The engine chugged slow, and the man ground a gear, pulling the rig to a stop just beyond the exit.
Terrified, gut cramping, I thanked them and got down quickly to hide my fear. The truck jerked forward, mud flaps swaying, embossed with silver reclining nudes. The square end of the trailer diminished and melted into the heat lines over the interstate.
Where in the hell was the river? I was expecting a canyon, a rift between two worlds that I’d pictured on the map, like the long zipper on the front of a woman’s jeans.
Heat poured off the concrete. It was everywhere, entrance and exit ramps, pickup trucks and cars drifting onto it with weekend laxity. I craned my neck as if the river might be beyond a guardrail. No luck. I had to hurry back.
I could feel the pressure of my feet against the ground as my heart beat vertigo into my bloodstream. My chest ached and I wanted to cry. I thought of my father’s stories, journeys across the continent, winters logging in the north
or mining in Alaska. Had I finally done something almost as incredible? My limited life, this body waiting on strength, it all seemed a sort of detention, a prison, and I was sick of waiting to be like him.
The heavy-metal reverb tore up my head as I ran along the ramp and crossed the overpass to the other side. I jumped a concrete barrier and began thumbing.
It took an hour to get a ride, again in a rig, and little by little, I calmed. I’d made it to Memphis, or close at least. I was heading home. Just three simple turns. That’s all it would take. As the havoc in my skull drew to a close, I started to talk again. I described the father I hadn’t seen in almost four years. At first, I said just a few things: that I was wandering the country like him, making my way. But hour after hour, as I had years before on the playground, telling tall tales, finding the past in snapshots, I discovered what I wanted to say. I put the pieces together as I spoke them. He’d traveled. We were the same. We’d been the same in so many ways, and now I was drinking and fighting. I couldn’t help but break rules. He’d broken them, too. The words my mother had spoken over the phone fit together. He wasn’t allowed across the border. He had his past. His record. After we’d left, the nights that he’d called and made threats, I’d overheard my mother’s whispers and understood the gravity of her fear. I knew that whatever he’d done was serious. It had to be. He’d beaten a man up. He must have been to prison and done terrible, amazing things, and I would, too. That was being a man. That was freedom. Just hearing myself, I felt wounded, older, and stronger.
“What did he do?” the trucker asked.
“I don’t know. I only know it was bad. He isn’t even allowed in the United States.”
My lack of knowledge seemed to satisfy him. It had the ring of truth, and he nodded solemnly.
Eventually, he let me off, and I caught another ride and continued telling stories, finding the same truths, becoming more certain. I described that early memory of the fight on the Indian reservation, seeing him with blood on his face.