by Deni Béchard
“No I’m not.”
I hunched, affecting the glowering brow of the burly redheaded man in the convenience store. I shoveled some more ravioli into my mouth, drank and swallowed.
“I need rent money,” I told him.
“Don’t you have it? You said you’re working.”
He forced an incredulous smile, as if I had to be kidding after my show of certainty.
“Almost.”
“How much do you need?”
“A hundred and fifty more.”
“How about this? I give you the money, and you work it off for me this summer.”
I sighed, squinting like the Italian tough waiting in the sports car, but this was exactly what I’d expected. I knew that he thought I couldn’t survive on my own, that I’d come back to him and give up on school, but I wouldn’t.
“Fine,” I said.
He took a wad of cash from his pocket and peeled off three fifties and tossed them before me, his eyes attempting compassion.
That I’d work for him in June created constant apprehension, distracting me at school and keeping me up at night. He mentioned the job frequently over the next months, but I just nodded and refused to say anything on the subject.
The face that worked best against him, I had learned, was impassive: the outside the opposite of the inside, offering nothing. I studied it in teachers when students complained, in the principal when he dealt with misbehavior, in the bus drivers who refused those who couldn’t pay the fare, in the police who directed traffic outside my school. This was how men dealt with the world. My father told stories, maybe to impress me or just to fill the silence, and though I enjoyed them, I did little more than nod. If I needed his money, I took it as if it meant nothing.
One night, entering a restaurant, we passed a man who was trying to ask for directions at the register, his English heavily accented. My father stopped abruptly and spoke in French, offering to help. The man, portly, with a ruff of gray hair, smiled and told him where he needed to go. As my father explained, his words seemed to come in spurts. He’d hesitate, then point outside, in the direction of the highway, and his mouth would hang open, and suddenly he’d give a list of instructions in a rush. Then he’d pause again, searching for words.
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Ça fait longtemps que t’es parti?”
My father flushed and looked off.
“Plusieurs années,” he said, then asked, “Tu viens d’où?”
“Chicoutimi,” the man told him, but the friendliness had faded slightly from his expression. He thanked my father for the directions and hurried out.
My father pulled at his jacket as if it hadn’t been sitting right on his shoulders. He sighed and glanced around the restaurant, blinking. Even after we were seated, he seemed uncomfortable and kept exhaling loudly, sounding annoyed. I wanted to ask him when he’d last spoken French, or any of the questions that came to mind when I thought about his past—who his parents were, where he’d grown up—but I didn’t want to upset him further.
“I was seeing this girl,” he finally told me, looking about as if unsure of what to say, and he rummaged in his jacket’s inside pocket and took out a Polaroid. A young woman sat on his couch. She had short, spruced-up dark hair and looked a little older than Jasmine.
“She’s pretty, huh?”
“Yeah,” I told him. “Yeah, she is. Are you still dating her?”
He shrugged and put the photo away. “Not really.”
“What happened?”
“It just wasn’t working.”
“And what about Sara?”
He scrunched up his cheeks as if with confusion, then went on to confess that he’d asked her to move in with him and start a family, but that she’d run away with the car he was lending her. Eventually the police brought it back, though he didn’t press charges.
“It’s strange,” he said, “how people can disappear in the same town.”
The thought occurred to me that for a criminal he relied on the police a little too much.
When I asked about Jasmine, he said only that she hadn’t wanted to do her job. He’d driven her to the countryside where her mother lived and dropped her off. Telling me this, he appeared distracted, his expression haggard. His life seemed empty, and in that emptiness I saw a threat. I didn’t want to be the person to fill it.
But complete freedom, I knew, would come only when I had wheels of my own. This seemed a biological truth: without a license and a car, nothing was possible.
After we’d finished eating, when one waitress was vacuuming and the other putting chairs upside down on tables, he looked around as if to leave, then hesitated and took the toothpick from his mouth.
“You know, I get it,” he said. “I remember when I didn’t want to listen to anyone. But I was a good kid. I logged or worked in mines, and I sent money to my family. Then, when I was eighteen, I guess, I realized what bullshit it was. I decided I’d had enough, and I left and hitchhiked across Canada, all the way to Vancouver. You wouldn’t really understand, but the world was changing back then. When I was a kid, I didn’t have many opportunities. Then I was a young man, and everything seemed possible. The music was different. People were dressing different. Quebec was changing, but I didn’t have an education or any skills other than manual labor. I was angry at my family. I’d given them everything, and my younger brothers and sisters had gone to school, but my parents had done nothing for me.
“Anyway, I started hitchhiking. This was before crime. I just wanted to get away from everyone. I was in Ontario, and I’d been dropped off and was walking, looking for my next ride. There was a river next to the road, and I saw a man on a boulder right in the middle of the rapids. It must have been springtime because the water was high. My English wasn’t very good back then, but I waved down a truck and stayed until some men with ropes and life vests got there.”
He paused. He’d been holding the toothpick in his fingers, rolling it back and forth, and now he put it down and stared off.
“When we finally pulled the guy out, we saw that he was from the reservation. He had a long black braid, and he didn’t say anything. We took him to a diner and gave him some dry clothes and a cup of coffee. That’s when he told us his friend had been taken by the river. That’s how he said it. ‘The river took my friend.’ The men who rescued him were pretty angry he’d waited so long to tell them. A police officer kept saying, ‘It’s just like one of them.’
“I joined the search party, and we spent all day walking the river, looking for the missing friend. I was just trying to be helpful, but I understood the Indian. When you know someone’s dead, what’s the point? I just cared about myself, about what I was going to do with my life, and I didn’t want to waste my time on a dead guy. But I helped even if it was pointless, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. When we got back to the diner, the Indian was gone. He didn’t even help us look. I thought a lot about that, and it made sense to me. I’d been worrying about making money for my family when I had nothing for myself. I was living just to work shit jobs. It really got me thinking about what I wanted. We’re not alive for that long, and you might as well go for it and make yourself happy.”
We were the only diners left, sitting in a forest of upturned chair legs, and I wasn’t sure why he’d told the story, what had caused him to remember or try to make peace. But I was in total agreement. I didn’t have sympathy for anyone. The only person who mattered was me, and I would do whatever was necessary to make my life the way I wanted it.
The rain and sleet that dogged the winter, the cold that froze the puddles left by the Northwest’s constant drizzle, gave way to sunny, mild days. But while other students relished the sunlight and wore T-shirts and shorts, I brooded, thinking of how I could avoid working for my father. For three months, he’d helped pay the rent. At school, I’d done everything I could to be a good student. I wrote for the yearbook, the school newspaper, ran cross-country, and worked out every day afterward in
hopes of returning home as late as possible. I refused drugs with a conviction that startled me, and I didn’t drink but for the occasional beer with my father. Instead, I wrote, feeling as if I stood on the edge of a cliff—as if, were I to look away from the page, vertigo would overcome me.
Students were crowding into the cafeteria, laughing, and pushing into line. I stopped at the bulletin board. I knew every post for contests and clubs, but there was a new one, a green photocopy: a Mandarin summer camp on Vancouver Island had fifteen places for BC students. I pulled the sheet down and hurried to my English classroom, but it was empty. My history teacher, a lean Trinidadian man, sat at his desk next door, eating rice from Tupperware. I asked if we could talk. He had me pull up a chair, and ate as I explained. His eyes bugged out when I described my father’s crimes. I knew I wasn’t being fair, but I was desperate.
By that afternoon, my teachers had met with the principal, who then called me into his office. They had agreed to write recommendations, and though the program didn’t offer scholarships, the principal had called its director and explained my situation. He’d proposed using school funds to pay for me.
When the time came to tell my father, I prepared my face.
“Mandarin—what do you mean?” he asked over dinner. “Like the oranges?”
“No. Chinese. I’m going to learn beginner’s Chinese.”
“Chinese!” he shouted and stood from his chair. Other diners turned.
“Fucking Chinese! You’re fucking going to learn Chinese!”
“It’s useful, you know,” I told him—that and some stuff I’d heard at school about how the Chinese might dominate the world. I remained seated, managing to stay impassive.
“But you’re supposed to work for me,” he said, showing his palms and then extending them slowly, as if offering a sword. The gesture was so full of frustration and confusion and supplication that I actually felt bad for him.
“I want to study Chinese,” I insisted, my expression empty, offering nothing he could fight. “It’s a big scholarship. Not everyone gets it. It was made especially for me. I can’t turn it down.”
He sat in his chair as if shot, staring, mouth open, eyebrows lifted.
“They made it just for you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a good student.”
He nodded once, then picked up his fork and stared down at the heap of twisted spaghetti, shaking his head as if his job were to untangle it.
A strip of yellow light gleamed beneath the drawn blinds. Across the small dorm room, my fat Taiwanese roommate snored. I inhaled the ethereal reek of his father’s cologne, with which he doused himself in hopes, I assumed, of easing homesickness.
That summer had begun with a long sigh of relief, but shortly after I’d exhaled it, I started plotting my next escape. Other students studied Chinese diligently while I wrote stories in my room and daydreamed. Before I’d left for the camp, my father told me that I still owed him that money and had to work it off. He added that if I worked for him, he’d forgive what I owed and would pay me instead.
An angry, restless sweat seeped from my pores and made the sheets cling. He wasn’t going to give up. Like the irregular idle of an old engine, my heart repeatedly grew loud, then faint, as if roaming my chest. A nervous current pulsed along my spine. I got up and left the room. I sat on the dorm steps. Beneath streetlamps, the trees on the University of Victoria campus appeared golden and motionless, peaceful and indifferent.
After a while organizing my thoughts, I went to the pay phone just inside the door. My mother answered on the second ring, her voice thick with sleep. I apologized.
“It’s okay,” she said quickly and cleared her throat. “I’m happy to hear from you.”
I described the camp, then brought up my plans for September. She said that if I came back, she’d help me buy a car. She’d bought my brother a used Honda two years before. I told her I didn’t like my father’s life, and I asked why she’d really left him.
“Well, lots of reasons,” she said. “Our relationship might have survived if there’d been family around or even real friends. But there was no one else. He didn’t want anyone to tell him how to live, or to say that he might be doing things wrong. And . . . and I guess I wanted to change and grow, and I couldn’t do that with him. I had to leave.”
What she described made sense: his strange, deracinated existence. His anger had raged in a vacuum, without check or equal. No one else had seemed so free, and yet she’d felt trapped. I realized how much courage leaving must have taken. She’d tried to create all she wanted with him, but in their isolation, she’d struggled to transform her life.
Once, at the Granville Island market, when I was five or six, he’d gone outside and crouched at the edge of the quay. He held his sunglasses a foot before his eyes, peering down through them, something he did to cut the glare on the water in order to see the fish. I came out and, loving his ritual of scanning below the surface, ran to him and tried to climb onto his shoulders, jumping and knocking him forward. Though surprised, he caught himself and shoved both of us back, practically throwing himself away from the edge.
“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” he yelled. “Get out of here!”
My mother came into the sunlight beyond the market building, and I ran to her. When I could talk through my tears, I asked what had made him so angry.
“He can’t swim,” she said, holding me.
“He can’t swim?” I repeated.
“No, he never learned. People don’t swim where he comes from. It’s too dangerous. The water’s too cold.”
I hadn’t realized there were things he couldn’t do, and I struggled to understand his confidence, how he could steer a boat or stand in a river and fish when he couldn’t do this one thing that all children learned. He’d rarely shown weakness, all of us seeming helpless next to him, and only now did I realize that he might have liked us that way. It didn’t fully make sense to me why someone who’d craved freedom as much as he did couldn’t see that we wanted the same thing.
Even though I knew that I would refuse to work for him, his face came to me, its disappointment and regret each time we’d met for dinner. There were so many aspects to him, so many contradictions. When I was a boy, he’d once sped his truck across a field, racing through tall, sunlit grass until he hit a hidden stump and broke not only his axle but his tooth against the steering wheel. When he came back to the house and told me what had happened, showing me the shard of tooth in his palm, I asked why he drove like that. He appeared confused, unable to explain, and he went on to tell the story again, making it sound less dramatic, as if he were just crossing a field. But I’d seen him be reckless often, and sensed how he breathed more easily in the thrill of that headlong rush. This had seemed normal, the dangers never real to me. Riding my bike on the narrow road, I swerved in front of oncoming trucks and tractors just to see them brake. I built jumps out of cinder blocks and slippery, half-decayed planks so that I could feel the joy of levitation at last.
But now, remembering this, I began to understand that the same impulse in him was part of what had ruined our family. Why were we so reckless and unsatisfied? It was simply a fact, a truth as clear as any physical need. And this longing still seemed to be my only distinct feeling—not sadness or fear or anger. When had I lost that core of emotion? At the ferry? When I held the baseball bat? All that remained was what I wanted, what I had to do. Beyond that, I felt empty.
After I said good-bye to my mother and she hung up, I punched in his number. I didn’t give myself time to think. My hand dialed with an automatic motion.
“Deni,” he said. “How’s your Chinese?”
“Good. Listen. I was thinking about next year.”
“Next year.”
“For eleventh grade. I want to go back to Virginia.”
“To Virginia,” he repeated, his voice absent of all intonation.
“Yeah,
I want to study there. I like that school better.”
The plan I’d formulated involved turning sixteen in Virginia, getting a driver’s license and a car, and moving out. It wasn’t that this would be easier there, but by moving between Vancouver and Virginia, I could break his hold. Dickie had already lost his power, and it would be easy for me to find a job and earn money.
“You listen here,” he said in a furious voice that no longer bothered me—“if you go back, you can’t expect anything from me. I’m cutting you off.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s okay.”
He didn’t speak, and I just stood there holding the phone, waiting for the silence to drag on long enough that one of us would hang up.
part IV
THE HUNT
The house was largely finished, sitting on a hill of naked red clay, the wet bulldozed terrain deeply eroded and surrounded by forest.
“Welcome back,” Dickie said, crossing the empty living room with a heavy-footed hunch. He hiked the corners of his mouth, the skin rucking up around his eyes.
My brother and sister came out of their rooms, his dark hair crushed on the side from his pillow, though it was evening, my sister’s carefully brushed sheen reaching to her shoulders, their eyes glassy with solitude.
I hitched my thumbs in my jeans and nodded, sizing up Dickie, measuring myself, significantly taller and built from months of weight lifting.
“I’ll get dinner on the table,” my mother said and escaped to the kitchen.
As we ate, she told me she’d received her certification in massage therapy and started a practice. Her enthusiasm reminded me of when she’d left my father, as if she needed the gravity of new ideas, new passions and possibilities, to pull herself free.
After eating, everyone slunk off to a different room, Dickie to the basement.
I read and later tried to sleep, but couldn’t. I got up and opened my door, the house silent, living and dining rooms without furniture, wires dangling from holes in the ceiling. I put on my shoes and went outside, then started down the driveway, into the forest.