Cures for Hunger

by Deni Béchard

“I can’t. I’ll be tired for class and . . . and I’ll smell bad.” Though I knew from the novels I’d read that generations of young men had worked like this, I also knew that generations of young men had defied their fathers.

  “Goddamn it,” he said, though I had the sense that he was muting his anger, afraid I’d leave. “What about your truck? You’re barely making enough to pay for it. You could use a bit more work.”

  “No way I’m working mornings,” I told him. “I’ll give the truck back. I don’t care.”

  “Okay. If it’s such a big fucking deal, then okay, let’s just drop it.” He prodded the chicken on his plate, took his beer, and sat back in his chair, rolling his shoulders and trying to adjust his demeanor. He smiled.

  “You’re really getting in shape, aren’t you? At least you’re training hard.”

  “That’s why I’m tired in the mornings,” I said.

  He nodded tersely. “I bet you’ll be really good. The men in my family were tough. My brothers were fighters, and my father was goddamn tough. His hands were so big we used to pass his wedding ring around and it was too big for my thumb.” He held up his fist. “People said that no one north or south of the Saint Lawrence could beat him in a fight.”

  He looked out the window, the restaurant shrubbery yellow in the light.

  “The only time he didn’t win was because he was too drunk. There were a couple guys trying to beat him up, and they kept hitting him, but he didn’t even swing back. He just lifted his finger like this and said, ‘I’m too drunk. I’ll get you all later.’ It was like he didn’t even notice he was being punched.”

  I laughed, trying to imagine this man I’d never met, whose name I didn’t even know. He was laughing, too.

  “You have that in you,” he told me, and it occurred to me that the story might have been planned for this reason alone—to encourage me to hold steady to the path he thought best. “I’m proud of you,” he said. “You’re going to make a hell of a boxer.”

  I snuck a glance at my watch. I had to leave soon if I wanted to meet the girl on time.

  “I wish I’d used my energy better,” he said. “You know, when you’re young, you have all that anger, and you have to do something with it. I had no guidance. I was so angry I’d drive like crazy, and if someone honked, I’d try to run him off the road. I’d stop my car, and if he got out, I’d beat him up. Fuck. I don’t even know what the point of that was. Beating up strangers on the side of the road when it was my fault to begin with. I really should have been a boxer, or played hockey. I wasted all of that energy on nothing. But you shouldn’t do that. You could take a year off from school and go professional. You’ll never be young again.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, nodding. His own words seemed to have embittered him, and I could see that he was looking for a way to tell other stories, to get me interested.

  He started in on a favorite, about traveling through Alberta and ending up at a party in Calgary. A woman started hitting on him, and her boyfriend came to beat him up. The guy was enormous, very German looking, and he and my father fought for a long time, throwing each other into walls, breaking everything in the house.

  “I’d been hanging out with the people at the party. It was always pretty easy for me to make friends, and when I started winning, they began cheering for me.”

  He hesitated, giving this some thought, as if he’d forgotten something.

  “They started shouting, ‘Go Frenchy,’” he said, then shook his head, as if the story weren’t quite as good as he recalled.

  “Listen, I have to go,” I told him.

  “Already?”

  “I have a date.”

  “Tonight? Sunday night?” he said and looked around the room, as if she might be there, watching us eat. “Well, you should bring her by the house sometime.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean what?”

  “It’s just a date.”

  “Okay, fine, go on your date.” He sat back and held his beer and stared off, and I said good-bye. He waved halfheartedly, refusing even to look my way.

  The date had come about because I’d told this girl that I drove through the mountains all night, stopping to look at the stars. When I described how I’d gone to the place I was born and parked near the river and slept there, she’d wanted to go, too. That night, I picked her up from the convenience store where she worked, and we drove to the mountains, parked, and put down the backseat and undressed. Eventually, we fell asleep, the heater on, the engine idling. Suddenly, dawn was lighting the windows. I threw on my clothes and raced to her house, speeding along the highways into the suburbs.

  Then I went home to get the schoolbooks I should have kept with me.

  “Where were you?” my father asked, opening the door to my room. He had on his jeans, veins dark in his face, the tendons in his throat lifted. “You come home making all this fucking noise and wake me up. I needed some extra sleep. What were you doing all goddamn night?”

  I met his gaze, trying to see if his anger was for show. I knew he’d use this as a pretense to say I should be working for him, making money and not fucking around.

  “Where were you?”

  “I went out for breakfast. I just got back.”

  “Bullshit. You were with that girl all night.”

  “So what?”

  “You listen to me,” he said, his face flushed, though between his words I sensed hesitation. “You don’t want to work except when it’s good for you, and you say you care about school but you don’t even sleep. How do you expect to get by?”

  “I have good grades.”

  “But you don’t give a shit about school,” he told me in that theatrical voice of his, exaggerated, somewhere between anger and ridicule.

  “I’m not dropping out.”

  “Then you’d better learn to take things seriously. And you can’t be a good fighter without sleep. If you’re going to stay up all night, you might as well work for me.”

  I put on my impassive face. We stood ten feet apart as he held the door, and I looked into his eyes and shook my head faintly. His scowl faded. He knew what I was thinking—that he’d been a criminal, had left home and lived as he’d wanted. Who was he to tell me what to do?

  He nodded once and shut the door, but the next morning, at four, he was pounding on it.

  “What?” I shouted, exhausted, having tried to make up for two nights of sleep.

  He threw the door open.

  “I need your help,” he said, that angry laughter in his eyes.

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “What’s the big deal? You don’t sleep anyway.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “I need your help now. At the store. Get your clothes on. It’s an emergency.”

  I sighed and flopped back onto my pillow.

  “Get out of the fucking bed!” he shouted.

  I rolled off and began pulling on my clothes.

  Our headlights swept out across the dark suburbs as I drove behind him, the night moonless and without clouds. We pulled up to his store. Frost had sketched icy calligraphy on the cracked asphalt of the parking lot. School would be letting out for Christmas soon, and I’d spend the entire break here.

  “I just got a shipment of salmon for almost nothing,” he told me as soon as he’d closed his door. “But I need to get them cleaned up fast.”

  As he unlocked the gate, his two German shepherds came to greet us. We went into the fenced-in backyard where he received deliveries.

  The lid of the large plastic crate was level with my chin, and he heaved it back. The soup of melting, bloodshot ice held hundreds of smallish salmon. Something about them didn’t seem right. I reached in and pulled one out, filaments of slime dribbling from it. The fish had a bulge in its head, another in its side. All of them appeared misshapen.

  “They have tumors,” he said. “I got them from a fish farm. Some of the batches go bad.”

  “Why?”
r />   “Who knows? Maybe it’s the shit they feed them. They have those experimental foods and the hormones to make them grow fast, and they give them dyes to make their meat red. It could be anything. Bad luck. They weren’t supposed to be sold. I bought them for next to nothing from a contact, a guy responsible for disposing of them.”

  “Like a garbageman?”

  “Yeah. Kind of like that.” He laughed and repeated, “Garbageman.” He said we’d fillet the salmon and resell them at normal price, a transaction that was almost pure profit. I understood that he needed my help because he couldn’t let anyone else see this. Though a few of his employees were ex-cons themselves, they seemed incapable of not talking about their crimes.

  A clear, gold-streaked dawn lit the horizon as we worked, the fenced-in yard cluttered with waxed cardboard boxes and trash cans. We cut the fillets, often half-size, tail sections, or strips—whatever was left after removing the hard, red knots of flesh. We ran our fingers over the silken meat, feeling for lumps. Not a single fish was normal.

  “Who are you selling these to?” I asked.

  “Restaurants. I have a lot of orders for fillets. They’ll never know the difference.”

  I kept checking the time as the sun clambered through the clouds.

  “I’m going to be late for school.”

  “No you won’t. Just go straight there.”

  “Like this?” I motioned to my work clothes speckled with fish blood and scales.

  “That’s how it was for me.” His eyes hardened, and he threw his knife down on the plastic cutting board and clenched his jaw. “I don’t know why I put up with you. I’m giving you two choices. From now on you work for me in the morning, or else I take the truck away . . .”

  I nodded once, stiffly, but said nothing.

  We double-bagged the tumors, bones, and guts in black plastic, and carried them to the Dumpster outside. Then I got in the SUV and rushed home to change, already late.

  An Irishwoman in a housedress came to the door and showed me a Dodge Omni parked in the street. It had mismatched tires and yellow paint discolored as if splashed with bleach. Dirty boxing hand wraps lay in the backseat. It had been listed in the paper for two hundred dollars.

  “It was my son’s,” she told me when I asked about the wraps. “He was a boxer, a good one, but he gave it up when a girl broke his nose.”

  “A girl?”

  “A lady in the boxing ring. She gave him a right beating, and he didn’t have the heart for it no more.”

  I hesitated, then slipped the folded money from my pocket.

  “I’ll take it,” I told her. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  It was a week after New Year’s. I’d scanned the classified ads daily over Christmas vacation. Having finished high school, my brother had come to live with us, hoping to build a relationship with my father and work for him, so the pressure was off me. Still, I was determined to leave. A coldness had set in between us. When I stayed out late, he commented: “You’re lazy. Look at you! How do you expect to be a boxer? You don’t even sleep.” Or he gritted his teeth and said, “Goddamn it, you’d better grow up!”

  He’d finally realized that leniency would get him nowhere. Only his rage could keep me in line. I didn’t think he was wrong, but I preferred freedom.

  Sleet was falling as I picked up the license plates for the Dodge. I drove to my father’s house and parked the SUV. Frosts had burned the grass yellow, and the unlit windows reflected the large wet pines along the property. I knew his schedule, but he sometimes returned unexpectedly to drop off hefty bags of dog food or the like. He was restless, his days filled with errands that seemed like excuses for him to prowl the streets in his truck. Maybe he felt the same need for movement that I did. I knew that he’d tried to appeal to me, to tell the stories I loved, but as with Dickie, I’d been looking for an excuse.

  I hadn’t packed anything yet. I was afraid he’d go downstairs and see my bags. In fifteen minutes, a classmate would be there to take me to the Dodge.

  I got out, swung myself over the black iron gate, and ran through the door and down to my room. I rushed, throwing everything into a duffel. I sprinted back out, pitched it over the gate, and followed. I shoved it behind my seat and sat, pretending to read.

  My classmate’s white Toyota pulled into the lane. When he stopped, I shuttled the duffel from my vehicle to his. I tossed the keys on the floorboard and took the new plates, and I slid into his car. He did a quick three-point turn and sped away. The tires made a rushing sound over the wet asphalt, large half-frozen raindrops striking the windshield. Soon we were on the highway, the downpour slackening unevenly, falling in hard pulses against us.

  An hour later, I crossed the border, retracing the windy path of my mother’s migration six years before. The rush-hour ranks advanced cautiously, the parade of taillights made garish by the icy downpour. In my rearview, endless headlights appeared crystalline behind the same rain. The motor buzzed like the remote-control car my father sent when I lived in the trailer park. Each time I gained speed, I feared it might explode.

  After midnight, I pulled into a rest stop on I-90, in eastern Washington. I folded the backseat and curled up in my blankets, my feet in the hatchback and my clothes serving as a mattress. The engine idled, fans beating hot air through the vents. I’d never been happier.

  To avoid the cold, I cut south on I-15 through Idaho and into Utah, before turning east on I-70. I taped a notebook to the dash, and as I drove, I wrote the sloping deserts and arid plateaus, the Rockies and their companionship with a sky wider and greater than my faith in anything. It lifted peaks into its light, making new monuments of them each hour, then abandoned them into the dark, which—I told myself as I tried to sleep, staring up at snowy, starlit crags through the hatchback window—was why mountains at night are a lonely thing to see.

  As the motor’s vibrations cradled me, I tried to envision my life. I saw the red lines of highways on the map, stretched between cities like threads of torn cloth. I imagined a book that could hold it all together, plains and mountain ranges, dust-drab towns beyond interstates, and somewhere on the far edges, the valley in British Columbia and those nights in Virginia when I snuck out and stalked the highway, trying to fathom where I belonged on this threadbare continent. Everyone I knew should see the world though my eyes, every friend, every girl I’d ever liked: frost glittering on dry plains at sunrise, or the highway carving through rolling hills with the perfect geometry of longing. It seemed a sin to witness it all in solitude, a reason to believe in an ever-present god.

  But loneliness was the trial of this landscape, my life at last like Steinbeck’s novels. The interstate opened onto a solitary earth, the quiet destruction of worn-out homes, thousands of miles of violent alchemy melting away a broken people, distilling them to a few resilient loners.

  The writer’s life was said to be chaotic and destructive and adventurous, and I felt that by choosing this over and over again, so much of who I was would become acceptable.

  The message came through my brother: my father’s anger, that I’d insulted him, that he never wanted to speak to me again, that I should expect nothing else from him.

  I tried not to think about it. The farther I got from his life, the clearer I was about mine. But the way I’d left had been extreme, a reminder for him of my mother’s betrayal. I wasn’t even sure why I’d done it—to be free or just to prove I could? When I tried to decide if he deserved it, I thought of how he had broken our family. Everything he’d built in his life seemed temporary—hopeless, even—like a few sandbags set against a dark, incoming deluge.

  Again, I worked the circuit of couches and guest bedrooms and odd jobs: construction, demolition, roofing, landscaping, washing dishes. My mother had left Dickie and was seeing someone new, a thin, bald man with a Wyatt Earp mustache and such a kind demeanor I could hardly believe she’d chosen him.

  The poet Henry Taylor gave a reading at the high school. He’d won something
called the Pulitzer Prize, but I didn’t expect much, his talk casual, his first poem prefaced with a concern for grammar. It described a horse eating grass through barbed wire, when it was spooked—by what wasn’t clear—and ran along the fence, barbs gouging its neck, tearing chunks from its throat. Hearing the rhythms, I wanted to jump up and shout, to tell the horse to stop, to command Taylor to keep reading, to feel the tremendous urge for life that the horse did in the final seconds of its destruction, as it “gave up breathing while the dripping wire / hummed like a bowstring in the splintered air.”

  Mumbling the lines over and over, I left school and drove to the restaurant where I washed dishes. How was it done? Passing racks of dishes, I had to restrain my hand from knocking them to the floor.

  The line cook with the greasy ponytail annoyed me, but I told him about the poem so I could snag half an English cucumber.

  “You wanna be a writer, huh?” he said, his front tooth chipped at a nicotine-stained angle.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you should read Kerouac.”

  “Whatever,” I said. Worn-out hippies were always telling me to read Kerouac. No one who didn’t look as if he’d scorched his neurons and had his skull sooted up with cobwebs had recommended him. But I nodded, devouring a plum tomato in two bites. Once, in a textbook, I’d read an excerpt from Magellan’s voyages, a paragraph devoted to how, starving, the crew sustained themselves with fruits and vegetables and meats entirely new to them. For me: leek soup, arugula salad, the hard ends of French bread.

  “Hey,” the line cook said, “go easy on the Gouda.”

  “Yeah, okay.” I snuck half a boiled potato from the counter and ate it in the walk-in fridge, garnished with dark olives from a plastic tub.

  The next morning, I asked my English teacher if I should check out On the Road.

  “You?” she said. “No, you should definitely not check out On the Road. The last thing you need is On the Road.”

  So I went to the library and got On the Road and Dharma Bums.