Cures for Hunger

by Deni Béchard

  The gravel offered a faint path, a ragged strip of sky above, palely lit by a shard of moon. I stopped. Not a single tree distinguished itself from the dark. If I stepped off the driveway, into the forest, would my eyes adjust and my senses recalibrate—touch, smell, hearing, the electric antennae of intuition? What was out there, and what did I want? I’d known before I arrived that I wouldn’t stay long. As soon as I had a car, I’d move out. Even on the flight, telling myself this had calmed me. But back here, I felt demoted, a boy again, as if the conflict with my father—the steady facing off over dinners and beers in drab restaurants—had indicated a sort of respect, a station that, while not manhood, felt close.

  When I was a child following him through fields of spruce and pine, he’d seemed attuned, his shoulders relaxed, his step fluid and ready for the spongy, uneven earth. He prowled, head shifting side to side in subtle motions as he scanned the rows. I’d imagined him a loup-garou, verging on the wild, so far from a normal life that the dark, animal transformation could no longer be resisted. And yet what did that creature want once the old self had been shed? What would satisfy it?

  I walked for hours, following the network of long driveways, gravel roads freshly cut through forests for new homes. When I became afraid, I imagined myself wild, hunting, eager for a fight. When this didn’t work, I pictured myself dead. All was lost, and nothing could hurt me. I’d let go of life. It worked. Fear dissolved. Was this how it was for him when my mother took us, when he couldn’t get out of bed and gave up on everything? Did the hunter have to die as a man?

  I came to moonlit gravel but kept to the dark. Prey, not hunters, stood in the light. I returned with silent steps, pausing to scan the forest, to study myself—the mechanisms of my body—so that each new step would be quieter.

  I eased the front door open and crept inside. The fridge switched on, the buzz of its motor loud in the empty, unfinished rooms. I peeled off my shoes and crossed the floor, stepping slowly. I crouched at my mother’s door. There was no sound inside. I slipped down the basement stairs, testing each step with the ball of my foot.

  A weak yellow bulb lit a water-stained lampshade. The crowded shelves of Dickie’s shop surrounded an unlit woodstove, and he lay facedown on a rug before it. A dozen beer cans stood in rank next to a rocking chair.

  I moved silently, pausing often, examining everything—the spray paint that would color nothing, the lacquers and enamels that would never protect, whose cans would rust with the tools gathered here.

  The marriage was fraying—I had no doubt now—the knickknacks of their affection abandoned, her presents to him become shop rags: the T-shirt drawn with lines like those on a butcher’s diagram (love handles, beer belly, man boobs), the boxers that said It’s Not the Size that Counts. Both hung from nails, blackened and greasy. The mug that read Small Men Do It Best held a stiff, dried-out paintbrush and a residue of turpentine. There wasn’t enough love left to sustain the sort of self-effacing humor that I’d never trusted anyway.

  Summer ended and I began eleventh grade. Soon the cooling leaves turned and dropped, revealing the deforested swath of power lines. Dickie came home from work and got out of his truck with his finger crooked in the plastic netting of a six-pack of Coors. He took his gun and threw his orange vest over his oxford. From my window, I could see his back as he drank, facing the open space beneath power lines. Occasionally, his shotgun pounded the silence as he clipped the squirrels that scurried past, preparing for winter.

  When I’d turned fourteen, almost two years earlier, he’d taken me deer hunting. A classmate had told me about his first hunting trip, how he and his uncle drove all night and through the dawn to a remote mountain camp. After he shot a sixteen-point buck, his uncle cut out the beast’s heart and put it in the boy’s hands, then painted his cheeks with the blood of his first kill. The idea of primitive rite thrilled me, the sense of brotherhood and initiation by hunting down something elusive and possibly dangerous.

  But Dickie just drove us in his Datsun past a new subdivision of identical houses with sunbaked dirt for yards, then pulled to the side of the highway.

  “This is a secret place I know,” he said and chuckled, shaking his head.

  From the hatch, he took a rifle that looked huge in his arms. He gave me an old shotgun, its stock scuffed as if it had been dragged on asphalt. A trail cut into the forest, and next to it ran two fresh wheel ruts, at the end of which someone had dumped a stove.

  A hundred feet into the woods, we came to a depressed clearing of beaten grass. He motioned for quiet and grinned conspiratorially, as if we were doing something sneaky.

  We sat at the bottom of a large oak and loaded our guns and waited.

  “Deer hunting is about patience,” he said, but then a squirrel began to run along the branches above us, and he trained his shotgun on it, one eye pinched shut.

  “Bang, bang, I got you,” he said softly. “Heh heh. Bang bang. Got you again.”

  I leaned against the oak, my feet propped in its gnarled roots. The November air hadn’t cooled much, yellow and red leaves still on trees and bushes, and I thought of the novels I loved, civilization on the verge of collapse, a warrior traveling into the unknown.

  “Psst,” Dickie said.

  A scrawny deer emerged into the clearing, stepping gingerly. It paused and began to twitch its ears wildly. Moving slowly, I aimed my shotgun. Dickie had his own stock to his shoulder. “Is that a buck?” he whispered. “Wait . . . wait until you see the horns . . .”

  Directly opposite me, on the other side of the clearing, a hunter stood from the bushes. He aimed his rifle at the deer and at me, and my bowels clenched. The deer bolted.

  “Dang it,” Dickie said. “That might have been a buck.”

  I followed him into the clearing, and three other hunters came out of the bushes, one of them zipping up his fly, two holding bonus-size cans of Coors. Each cradled a rifle with a scope. Dickie was talking to the man who’d aimed his gun at me.

  “Was that a buck?” he asked.

  “Couldn’t be sure,” the man replied. He towered over us, his short-cropped beard and eyebrows as red as his hunting vest, as if he’d dyed them for the season. He pulled an open beer from the netting on the front of his hunting vest.

  “I thought I might have seen some little horns,” Dickie said.

  The man finished chugging. “Yeah, it could’ve had tiny antlers.” He crunched the empty can and tossed it behind him.

  “Looked like a doe to me,” another hunter said, pushing plastic bifocals up his nose. He held a half-rolled Playboy magazine.

  “I thought it might’ve been a little buck,” Dickie pressed on, but everyone lost interest and wandered back to their bushes and trees.

  We left soon after. Dickie told me it wasn’t worth staying, that those fools had ruined everything. This had been my only experience deer hunting. Now he hunched before the power lines, hoping for a buck.

  I’d be sixteen soon.

  Leaves fell, ticking away the seconds.

  I blared music—Metallica or the Rolling Stones—and read whatever I could find: The Stranger, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, interplanetary sci-fi, a fantasy series with another elusive Dark Lord whose henchmen seemed more threatening than he did. As the characters traveled to East Egg or the mountains of Spain, or across monster-inhabited lands and eerily desolate solar systems, I relished their freedom.

  Then, finally, my birthday came, and I had my driver’s license.

  I did a quick reckoning. Of the few things in my room, only the schoolbooks, some copied cassettes, and a few changes of clothes were mine. It would all fit in the blue three-hundred-dollar Honda my mother had found.

  I twisted the stereo’s knob. The plastic speakers rattled against the floor with Megadeth’s bass line. Dickie had hardly spoken to me since I returned, barely looked at me if we passed each other. But when my mother told him that I had my license, I felt the atmosphere shift. He’d been my age once, a
nd he knew his duty.

  The guitar riff had risen to a wild pitch when he threw the door open. His eyes weren’t furious, the drama scripted. It was a prophecy whose edicts we—youthful hero and dodgy lord of darkness—were destined to fulfill long before we met.

  “Out!” he shouted with perfunctory rage. “Just get the hell out!”

  He seemed afraid, yelling drunkenly before scurrying down the basement stairs.

  The narrative of exile was mine. If I stayed, I’d be no different than everyone else, lacking courage. Sameness seemed like a disease, or a form of retardation, like not hitting puberty.

  “So, yeah,” I said that evening over dinner, to the parents of a classmate I’d called from a pay phone, “he kicked me out. He’s a drunk. I doubt my mom will stay with him . . .”

  But when I called my mother later, she tried to convince me I was wrong.

  “He said he didn’t kick you out!”

  “Well, he did.”

  “He didn’t mean it. I talked to him. You can come back.”

  “No, I can’t. I’m not living in that house with him. You’re not even happy . . .”

  Her silence told me that I was right about one thing—she’d rather not be there either. It wasn’t that Dickie wanted me gone. He wanted all of us to disappear, and she knew it.

  From couch to guest bedroom I went, consuming food, books, and the sitcoms other families watched, laughing with them. I mowed their yards, chopped firewood, and washed dishes. I loved the car, the smell of sunlight on the cracked plastic dashboard, the taste of dust when I ripped down dirt roads.

  Until this point, the weeks had been predictable, unlike this satisfying challenge of finding a place to sleep, of measuring the days when a friend said, “My parents agreed that you can stay over until Wednesday,” and another offered me a basement couch for the weekend. The details of survival, of getting enough food, of telling stories to parents that won me further invitations, of being among strangers, talking, doing chores, finding odd jobs on farms—the sense of action, of achievement—nothing could have made me happier.

  When I didn’t have a couch, I lived out of my car. I got a job mucking stalls and another washing dishes at Pizza Hut, where I subsisted off mistaken orders. In January, I moved in with a friend who had an apartment, and changed schools to be nearby, but the apartment ended up crowded with cast-off youths jockeying for the bathroom, for the stale pizza in the fridge, for places to sleep. Three months later, after a dispute, I went back to my itinerant life.

  Half-asleep, often late and disheveled, I rushed to school each day from a different direction. In science class, as we learned about the origins of life, I wondered where the shift had occurred, from one protozoan digesting another to an organism just longing, staring at the horizon, wanting to feel fully alive.

  The highways to school or work or friends’ houses seemed to pulse, to rumble with the arterial thrill of my blood. I wondered if this was how my father felt when he left Quebec. Sometimes he came to me, his wild joy when I raced through traffic, or his rage when someone confronted me. Why did he seem to hold the secret to what I was looking for?

  My life was building to a crescendo, I told myself. With each curve of the highway, I felt that I was arriving, only to be disappointed when nothing changed.

  One afternoon, I was driving down a hill on a country road that ended at a T where another beaten strip of gravel followed the wooded shore of a small, rocky river, when my brake pedal went soft. I slammed my foot two, three times, but there was only a hollow chopping sound, like a hatchet striking dry wood. I threw the gearshift into first and popped the clutch, and the car jerked, the gear whining as I slowed. I spun the steering wheel before I reached the T, and came onto the road sliding sideways. Then I slammed the gas, gravel rattling against the undercarriage, and the right tires bumped the raised grassy shoulder before their treads caught and shot me forward.

  I eased up on the accelerator and coasted, then switched the ignition off and let the car putter and jerk to a stop. I got out and stood and caught my breath. Crickets whirred in the tall grass, and somewhere, behind the few faint sunlit clouds, a jet rumbled.

  I went to the front and knelt. Brake fluid dripped from the burst caliper, and I sighed and sat against the bumper. The dust that I’d stirred up at the T was catching up like a slow shadow, drifting over the car, speckling the paint.

  I didn’t have enough money to repair this, and between work and school and the houses of friends where I commandeered the empty bedrooms of older siblings who’d left for college, I had to drive constantly. Briefly, I found it hard to swallow or breathe. I told myself I was fine. I could handle this, enjoy it, even. I’d driven a bike without brakes in BC, and my father had traveled from Calgary to Tijuana in a truck without brakes.

  I walked along the road to clear my head, then turned. The paint along the front edge of the Honda’s hood and roof had long ago worn away, as if from a sandstorm. At a glance, no one would know that it lacked brakes. The emergency didn’t work either, but I could stop by downshifting hard or cutting the engine.

  I got back in, started it, and practiced accelerating then stopping, seeing how long it took after I switched off the ignition. Putting the car in first gear also worked. So long as I didn’t tailgate or come up fast on a stop sign or a red light, I should be fine.

  By the end of the day, I felt exultant. I understood what my father must have experienced crossing the United States this way, testing himself.

  Just before sunset, I pulled into the driveway of a girl who’d invited me to dinner. She was a senior, and in the carefree energy of that last week of school, the sun a growing presence in the blue, humid sky, she’d invited me over.

  “Do you want to sleep here tonight?” she asked as we ate canned ravioli, only the two of us at the table. Her long brown hair lay against one shoulder, and she wore a blue summery dress with tiny white flowers on it.

  “What about your parents?” I glanced around the empty house.

  “Don’t worry about them.”

  As she explained the plan, a state trooper pulled into the driveway, and I almost jumped out of my seat.

  “That’s my stepfather,” she said. “He doesn’t care about anything. He won’t even notice you.”

  He came through the front door in uniform, didn’t say hello or look at us, and prepared a sandwich in the kitchen with brisk, silent motions. His gray face had a metallic tinge, his chin protruding more than his small nose, as if to hold the strap of his round state trooper’s hat.

  I said good-bye to her and drove to a nearby church, where I parked as she’d instructed. When it was fully dark, I crept back through the woods, pausing just beyond her yard to survey the windows. Then I moved quickly to the basement door and let myself inside.

  But the tryst lacked heart, her plan a little too smooth in its execution, and our passions muted so as not to betray my presence. Lawmen seemed far scarier than criminals. Still, I did my best. Later, as she snored softly, I stared at the ceiling, planning, thinking through the next steps. She tried to draw close in her sleep, but I pulled away. I’d had a few flings over the past year, but survival overshadowed romance, and if someone held on even a little tightly, I panicked and fled.

  Now I had to decide what to do once school let out. I was running out of avenues, nearly penniless, my car without brakes, its engine knocking, the muffler coughing black smoke. I hadn’t called my father since I left, but he might understand. I’d never managed to hold all the different versions of him in my head: the reckless, entertaining man I’d known as a boy; the criminal I’d imagined; or the fishmonger, racketeer, and thug.

  Maybe I could go back for a few months, for a breather. Then I could escape again, stay moving. He’d realize that I was living as he had. His stories of travel still inspired me, and I saw myself in them just as I’d once imagined bank robberies, the raised pistol as motionless as a planetary body, or the sudden dusk of shot-out lights.

/>   When I woke, dawn hung like sea scum in the glass. I dressed and crept into the empty basement, the house silent but for the gnawing of carpenter bees in a beam above the door. I eased it open. This part scared me, the thought of her stepfather dressed for work, gun on his hip as he had his coffee and looked out the upstairs window. My exposed back tingled as I high-stepped across the yard, into the woods.

  When I made it to the church, my pant legs were wet with dew. I swung the car door open and sat inside and started my homework. Sunlight spilled over the forested horizon, making the nerves behind my eyes pulse, and a family of five large, ragged stray cats returned from a night of hunting to their home beneath the church’s foundation. They sat just outside, nuzzling each other with scarred faces, their calico tufts brilliant in the early light.

  My mother was waiting in the parking lot outside Pizza Hut, her van door open. My shift had finished, and I glanced around to make sure that my co-workers couldn’t see me.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m fine. Why are you here?”

  “I wanted to check on you. I didn’t know how to get in touch. You should call more.”

  “Listen, I can’t talk now.”

  “I just wanted to know if you’re finishing school this year.”

  “Yeah, I am. I’ll be fine. I have two days left. It’s easy—too easy.”

  She stared at me, her gray hair pinned back. She had one hand on the door, her sleeve rolled to the elbow, her forearm finely muscled.

  “I’m not moving back,” I told her.

  “I’m not asking you to. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to stay with him either.”

  “So what will you do?” I said, suddenly worried, and yet angry at her for making me think of anything but myself.

  “I don’t know yet. I’m figuring it out.”